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VOYSEY 



VO YSE Y 


Vby 

ROWSE 

AUTHOR OF ‘'THE POISON OF ASPS,” ETC. 


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Neto gork 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 

1901 


Aii rights reserved 


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THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 
Two Copies Received 

APR. 16 1901 


COPVRIOMT EHTRY 



Oyxxa N«. 


733 / 

COPY B. 



Copyright, 1901, 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 


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VOYSEY 


PART I 
I 

M. Splevinski, the veteran pianist, was making his way 
apologetically to his instrument, bowing as he went a little 
elaborately to the ladies over whose skirts he stumbled in his 
short-sighted shuffling way. The tide of conversation ebbed ; 
laughter unexpectedly acquired a strangeness that was almost 
melancholy ; the words of late talkers travelled in the lull 
of the gathering silence. The people in the crowded rooms 
changed their attitudes, and made their faces appropriately vacant. 
For five minutes the only sounds were those due to the won- 
derful execution of M. Splevinski, and, in his easier moments, 
to the accompaniment of the rumbling in the road below. 

Then the troubled piano was at rest again, and people’s 
faces recovered an expression. The volume of conversation 
swelled, and a higher note of cheerfulness, as from rising 
spirits, could be caught in the voices of the company. It 
was as if people were not merely glad to be released from the 
constraint this little tribute to genius had imposed upon their 
attention, but were anxious to efface the memory of it, as of 
an act of virtue performed in public of which they were 
slightly ashamed. 

To the general change of expression, however, which the 
veteran pianist produced with his closing chords, there were 
two conspicuous exceptions. By the portiere of a door lead- 
ing from the room in which the piano stood to a smaller and 

B I 


2 


VOYSEY 


less crowded chamber beyond it, were the figures of two 
young men. One was pale, and the other was sunburnt; 
one was of medium height, and the other was something 
below it ; the one had a full prominent moustache, and the 
other a moustache in a stage of promise : but they had this 
in common, that M. Splevinski had failed to move the grave 
impassivity of their faces by either going to the piano or 
leaving it. It was some moments since they had spoken, and 
the attention they gave to the groups about them was clearly 
indifferent and superficial ; and yet they had scarcely the 
appearance of being bored. It seemed as if they were en- 
gaged in keeping themselves in readiness in case they should 
be called upon for an observation. 

By and by an opportunity for speech was offered them. A 
young man, a little older than they, who might be twenty- 
nine, or even perhaps have reached thirty, came to their door 
on his way from the larger room to the small r. 

“ What a busy man you are, Voysey ! ” said the shorter 
of the two. “ Where are you off to now ? ” 

“ Why don’t you contribute a little ? ” 

“ Make ourselves useful, eh ? No need to,” said the 
taller, slightly raising his chin as he spoke to escape the edge 
of his collar. 

“ Your exertions seem to have affected your tie,” suggested 
the first. 

Voysey put up his hand and rescued his tie, and brought 
it gently back to the centre of his shirt-front. “ How’s 
that ? ” he asked. 

“ Oh, that’s a credit to you.” 

It was not merely in the irregularity of his tie, and a cer- 
tain independence in the doing of his hair, which was more 
abundant than his friends’, and seemed less amenable, that 
this young man differed from the others. They belonged to 
the scene superficially — decoratively, as one of them had 


VOYSEY 


3 


sought to convey ; he, if disposed to claim a little liberty for 
himself here and there, seemed to have part in the spirit of it. 
In his own way, however, he too had the look of a Londoner, 
and indeed the worn experience of his expression might have 
suggested that he was even more of a Londoner than they. 
But the vigour of his step, and the concentration in the keen 
eyes under the broad strength of his forehead told a different 
tale, and, clearly, if he had lived well, on the whole he had 
not lived unwisely. He was fair ; the colour of his eyes was 
dark; there was in them observation of the kind from which 
the yield in impressions is rich : he had a small, well- 
trimmed moustache, high cheek-bones, slightly hollow cheeks, 
a pleasant mouth, while the tone of his skin gave him the 
look of being very lightly, but durably, browned by the sun. 
It was a face that women had seldom gone so far as to call 
good-looking, though they had sometimes thought it interest- 
ing. For men ibwas a strong, alert, intelligent face of a type 
to which a man of business, if at least he had had an eye for 
capacity as well as achievement, would have been inclined to 
take. It was not the face of a man of action ; it was without 
the urgency, the assertiveness, the suggestion of a way to 
make, a point to be reached, a point to be held, that marks 
the man of importunate ambition. If he were in pursuit of 
a point at all, it was more probably a point of view. And it 
seemed likely that of such points he might manage to seize a 
good many. In any case it was the face of a man whose 
experience had been not inconsiderable, and in approaching 
whom you might feel an assurance that the meeting would 
not turn to an encounter. 

“ It is uncommonly slow,” he said. 

“You do too much; you shouldn’t let people introduce 
you,” said the young man in whose face there was colour. 
“ You can get through a thing like this if you keep quiet, and 
don’t talk. You don’t come to these things to talk.” 


4 


VOYSEY 


Oh, our poor hostesses ! ’’ 

“Brooks keeps his good things for the privacy of his 
domestic circle,” said Brooks’s friend, he who raised his chin 
to avoid his collar when he spoke. “By the way, Voysey,” 
he went on, “ I am going down to stay with Hunter for a day 
or two next week ; he has set up a motor, and wants me to 
go and try it. You know Mrs. Hunter, don’t you ? ” 

“Yes — she is delightful.” 

The young man looked uncertain. “ I heard she went in 
for orphan girls, or women’s settlements, or something or 
other. Doesn’t she go about lecturing ? ” 

“ She used to, I believe.” 

The look of uncertainty deepened. “ I shouldn’t have 
thought a woman of that kind was much in Hunter’s line.” 

“ No : it is he who is in her line.” 

“ Eh ? ” 

“ He is a good fellow — and so is she.” 

“ You like her ? ” 

“ She is delightful.” 

Voysey felt a light touch on his arm. “Who is delight- 
ful ? ” asked the owner of the fan that had touched him. 

“ Mrs. Hunter.” 

The lady, their hostess, a tall, pretty woman of about seven- 
and-thirty, with unnaturally innocent blue eyes, made the least 
possible little face. Voysey smiled. “ I want to speak to 
you,” she said, moving on into the smaller room. 

“ I want to introduce you to some one who doesn’t know a 
soul here,” she went on, when they had reached a compara- 
tively free space under a chandelier. “ Jack has picked her 
husband up in the City; he is doing business with his firm, 
his uncle, or something ; and made me call upon her. They 
live at Bedford Park. They have rather a nice little house. 
And that’s all I know about them. I was out when she called 
here. Do you mind ? Jack is very anxious I should look 


VOYSEY 


S 


after her ; and I have asked you because most nice men are 
so horridly ill-natured — about making themselves agreeable, 
I mean. You won’t find her interesting, but she’s pretty.” 

Voysey was amused. ‘‘ Oh, if she’s that ! ” 

Mrs. Harrington, however, seemed to penetrate the young 
man’s amusement. “ Ah, it’s all very well ; your turn will 
come one of these days,” she told him. 

“ I thought my turn had come,” he answered, humbly. 

“ Don’t be stupid, Bertie. Come now, and I will intro- 
duce you to her.” 

Voysey followed his hostess back into the larger room, past 
the two sentinels at the door, and a knot of animated middle- 
aged men that had gathered by the piano ; past tall men in 
awkward attitudes who were talking to women in low chairs, 
and young men sitting with their elbows on their knees, show- 
ing a good deal of white wristband, talking to women who 
were fanning themselves ; past unusual-looking people whose 
presence seemed a trifle difficult to account for, and girls with 
the colour of the country and the set features of the town ; 
past older ladies who showed an anxiety of expression and 
had a general air of being on guard, and older ladies still who 
appeared to be enjoying themselves ; past M. Splevinski, who 
was sitting between an attentive old lady with beautiful white 
hair and an even stranger man than himself who was a popular 
preacher: followed his hostess through the packed groups down 
the length of the hot, over-crowded room to a distant corner 
where, by an arrangement of silk and flowers, two ladies were 
sitting on a diminutive sofa. The younger, who was the 
daughter of his hostess, a girl of eighteen with older eyes than 
her mother’s, immediately got up, passing Voysey with a curi- 
ous little look of recognition ; and, a moment or two later, he 
occupied the place she had left. 

He was not without courage, and was not by any means 
without resources, but at the first glance at Mrs. Detmond — 


6 


VOYSEY 


whose name, by the way, he had failed to catch — he suffered 
a presentiment of difficulty. She was not without personal 
advantages — Mrs. Harrington had not gone too far ; she had 
a pretty head, pretty hair, a pale smooth cheek, and eyes in 
which (this was how he himself put it) the feminine virtues 
were not too conspicuous : but he felt sure she was without 
conversation. She seemed to receive him with a mental draw- 
ing back, as it were, a kind of intimation that she wished him 
to understand she was in no way taking the field. If he came 
on, it must be upon his own responsibility. And he found it 
curious that a woman who had so much on her side, who had, 
so to speak, so good a right to be there, should suffer from 
this excessive diffidence. And the more curious because in 
spite of herself, in spite of her shyness, she had a little air of 
taking the field, she produced a definiteness of impression. 
She appeared to be tall, and though she was still in the early 
twenties, her person was developed and mature — mature indeed 
almost to the point of suggesting a hint at the approach of the 
matronly. 

“ No, I don’t know many people here,” he was saying. “ I 
have been introduced to one or two — not many. But I know 
our hostess,” he added. 

Mrs. Detmond looked surprised. “ Doesn’t every- 
body ? ” 

“ Not by any means. And there are very few of us who 
are not a little afraid of having to talk to her.” 

‘‘To Mrs. Harrington ? ” 

“ Only because she is our hostess, not because she is Mrs. 
Harrington. Only to-night, I mean. Hosts and hostesses 
are mildly taboo.” 

Mrs. Detmond’s surprise deepened. She had a look of 
drawing still further back, of a more complete rejection of 
responsibility. She held her black fan for a moment very still 
on the lap of her black dress. Her shyness was of the kind 


VOYSEY 


7 


that makes people sit very still. Then, as the little pause 
began to drag, she took refuge in a change of question. 

“ Are there any celebrities here ? ” she asked. 

“Not many, I think — there is Splevinski.” 

“Yesj I meant ” 

“ Among us ? There is the big tall man with the hair 
Splevinski is talking to — Mr. Roden.” 

“ Is that Mr. Roden ? What — what a strange-looking 
man ! ” 

“ Ah, that’s the music. The music has got into his hair.” 

“ I thought you meant Mr. Roden the popular preacher.” 

“ Popular preacher, musician, lecturer, humourist, author, 
popular entertainer — all sorts of things. But it all comes 
under the head of either preaching or music. His entertain- 
ments are always connected — or are supposed to be connected 
— with one or the other. He always provides himself with a 
text. Or perhaps one should say with a pretext.” 

She looked at him doubtingly, but this time he detected, or 
fancied he did, a first yielding of the shyness. 

“ And is the lady with the white hair a celebrity ? ” 

“ Ah, no — at least, she would be sorry to hear you call 
her one. She is something much better — a perfectly charm- 
ing old gentlewoman.” 

“You know her, of course? ” 

“ She was an old friend of my father’s. She has been very 
nice to me.” 

“ But she is somebody — really ? ” 

“ She has been — though never just in the popular sense. 
She comes of an old Catholic family, and was a member once 
upon a time of a rather wonderful little circle. One of those 
little circles that have a great deal of influence, and pull a 
good many strings, and of which the world at large knows 
nothing at all. No, she doesn’t live in London. She lives 
at her place — a very dear old place it is — in Sussex. She 


8 


VOYSEY 


is staying with the Harringtons. Mrs. Harrington happens 
to be her great-niece. I am surprised she has allowed her- 
self to be captured for this.” 

“ She doesn’t approve ” 

Of our modern ways ? Oh, she lets us off lightly. She 
is very merciful, very tolerant : when we are especially mod- 
ern, she just pretends she doesn’t understand. You see, she 
has extended her tolerance even to Mr. Roden ! ” 

Fortunately, at that moment, the first notes of the accom- 
paniment of a song came from the piano, and Voysey gained 
a small respite. And the respite was welcome to him, for on 
the whole his presentiment had been fulfilled ; the burden of 
conversation had rested too much upon his shoulders. Still, 
after all, this burden, when a woman has a little gift for pro- 
ducing a definite impression, is one most men will make some 
effort to sustain, and Voysey discovered, as the minutes went 
by, that he was beginning to wonder to what extent, in not 
doing better, she was doing injustice to her intentions. It 
had occurred to him that she was doing them injustice ; he 
had little doubt that they were innocent enough, her inten- 
tions, but they were of a kind, he fancied, to have made her 
not unwilling to help him, if she could, to extract whatever 
personal, or even perhaps emotional, interest a meeting like this 
may provide. He felt sure she would have had no objection 
to extracting this interest if she had possessed the experience 
for conversational adventures. And of her want of it the fact 
that she came, as Mrs. Harrington had told him, from Bed- 
ford Park seemed an insufficient explanation. There could 
be no reason why experience, at least of a kind, should not be 
gained at Bedford Park. And then he saw with an effect of 
sudden illumination that in the inner sense she did not come 
from Bedford Park, and he was beginning to wonder where 
as a matter of fact her opportunities had lain, when the music 
unexpectedly left off, and conversation had to be renewed. 


VOYSEY 


9 


He set the ball in motion again with a question about the 
song. 

‘‘ No, I never go to concerts, ’’ she told him, presently. 
‘‘My husband doesn’t care for music. We go to the theatre 
sometimes. But we live out of London — and it’s such a 
bother getting back at night. It’s so awkward, too, about 
dinner.” 

This was the first allusion she had made to her husband, 
and it caught Voysey’s ear. He conceived a theory of the 
husband. He suggested that if she was fond of music, she 
should not acquiesce too readily in this disinclination of her 
husband’s. 

Again for a moment she kept her fan very still, and there 
was a just perceptible change in her expression. 

“ I think I prefer the theatre,” she said. 

He named a piece of the lighter kind, and inquired whether 
she had seen it. 

“No. It’s a farce, isn’t it ? I don’t care for that kind of 
thing.” 

“ Nor your husband perhaps ? ” 

She hesitated, and her hesitation, he saw, stood for a parting 
of the ways. She took the turning that led to a lessening of 
the distance. 

“Yes, I rather think it’s the kind of thing he does care 
for,” she admitted. 

He was for following his advantage up. “ And I fancy I 
know where your own preference lies,” he declared, becom- 
ing boldly direct. “You prefer the romantic ! ” 

It looked for a moment as if she felt he was going just a 
little too fast ; he thought she was inclined to turn back : his 
manner, however, suggested a sort of good faith that tem- 
pered the personal in his speech — and there was a further 
yielding of the shyness. 

“ What do you prefer ” she asked. 


lO 


VOYSEY 


“ I ? Oh, comedy. But I am not much of a theatre-goer. 
I get most of my comedy out of the private life.’’ 

“ You know a great many people ? ” 

“Crowds — all London!” he laughed. “I expect,” he 
added, “ you read a good many novels.” 

“ I suppose so. They fill up the time.” 

“ Have you much time to fill up ? ” 

His manner was acquiring a little air of protection, or 
rather of patronage : — and she felt it. 

“ Don’t you read novels ? ” she inquired. 

“Any amount I — I imagine, if your husband is in the City 
all day, you have a good deal of time to fill up.” 

“ Do you know my husband ? ” she asked. 

“ No •, but I have heard he is a friend of Mr. Harrington’s, 
and I gathered that he was in the City.” 

The explanation seemed to satisfy her. “ Yes, I am a good 
deal alone,” she answered. 

“ I envy you,” he said. 

“ Do you ? Is your time then very much occupied ? ” 

“Oh, chiefly with going the round, I suppose — chiefly 
with people, you know.” 

She looked at him with an expression of uncertainty. 

“ I shouldn’t have thought you would have wanted much to 
be alone,” she said, “ if people amuse you so.” 

Voysey laughed. “ The comedy of the private life 1 ” he 
echoed. “ Ah, one can’t keep it up, you see. (To keep it up 
always one would have to be so uncommonly good 1 ’\ 

But he felt he had done his duty. If an occasion for 
escape should present itself, he thought he would be entitled 
to use it. And it so happened that fortune favoured him, for 
even then Mr. Harrington, their host, approached the sofa, 
and Voysey, knowing his interest in this particular guest, 
found it easy to resign his place to him. 

It was getting late, and Voysey, who had tired of the enter- 


VOYSEY 


1 1 

tainment much earlier in the evening, decided that he v^^ould 
seek his hostess. He found her upon the landing, from the 
comparative emptiness of which he inferred that he would 
not be the first to leave, and made his excuses to her. “ How 
did you get on ? ’’ she asked. 

“ Oh, rather well, I think.” 

“ She is pretty, isn’t she ? ” 

“ Decidedly.” 

“ But not very interesting ? ” 

“Well : possibly, if one knew her better ” 

Mrs. Harrington looked at him with her innocent blue eyes, 
and smiled. “You saw possibilities,” she suggested. 

“ Rather distant possibilities.” 

The lady made a little gesture. “ Most women have that,” 
she said. 

He had left Mrs. Harrington, and was bowing a cursory 
good-night to her daughter, who was talking to a man near 
the top of the stairs, when this last suddenly stepped forward 
and stopped him. 

“ Isn’t your name Voysey ? ” he asked. 

“ Certainly.” 

“ I thought so ! I saw you some time back, but couldn’t 
get near you. You don’t remember me? ” 

Voysey apologized. 

“ My name’s Detmond. We used to meet in Rawlinson’s 
rooms at Oxford.” 

A faint light of recognition dawned in Voysey’s eye, but 
the light at the same time threw a shadow across his face as 
if, admitting the fact, he were wondering how it justified the 
warmth of this greeting. 

“ I knew you the moment I saw you,” Detmond went on. 
“ You have not changed much. But look here, we seem to 
be blocking the stairs. Come this way a moment.” And 
he led Voysey into the emptying room on their left. 


12 


VOYSEY 


The unnecessary cheerfulness of Mr. Detmond’s manner 
was sustained by his face and person. In height he stood 
slightly above the average, and in fulness of figure his genial 
proportions tended to pass beyond it. His face was clean 
shaven, and of that perfect smoothness in the dark places 
which clever shaving will give to a well-moulded chin and 
cheek. It was suffused with an infantine reddishness, or 
rather pinkness of hue : a hue that was curiously invariable, 
like the uniform pinkness of tone on the body of a child, or 
on the infant day at its birth. His nose was aquiline, digni- 
fied, impressive ; taken with the well-formed chin and cheek, 
it lent his tinted countenance a kind of mock classic dignity. 
His mouth was slightly puckered, as it might be with a readi- 
ness to receive the humour of other people, while the good- 
humoured shrewdness in his eye made him seem to be ever 
on the watch for it. From the maturity of his figure, which 
he carried well, one might have inferred that he was some 
years older than Voysey ; as a matter of fact, they were of 
the same age. 

‘‘ What have you been doing all these years ? ” he was 
asking. “ I suppose you’re in London, or you wouldn’t be 
here. I wonder I’ve never come across you.” 

“ I have not done very much, I am afraid. I have been 
called to the Bar.” 

“ Briefs — pretty plentiful, eh ? ” 

“ I am not practising.” 

“ Ah, got bread-and-butter without it ! Lucky man ! I 
am in the City. I was going into the Church when I was at 
Oxford. But an uncle of mine offered me a berth just 
before I took my degree, and I accepted it. And I am un- 
commonly glad I did. It has turned out a good thing. He 
has taken me into partnership ! ” 

“ I congratulate you,” said Voysey. 

“Thanks. Yes, when I look at the men who were up at 


VOYSEY 


13 


Oxford in our time, I feel I have been lucky. Not many of 
them seem to be doing much good. The Church, school- 
mastering — poor businesses. Very well to begin with, while 
a man’s single — but don’t lead to anything. Give you posi- 
tion, society, that sort of thing — at least the Church does,” 
the genial face was momentarily shadowed, “ but if a man’s 
a gentleman, he can always get that, can’t he ? ” 

‘‘ Generally, I suppose.” 

“ Of course : that’s what I always say.” His face bright- 
ened again. “ But these things take time. Rome wasn’t 
built in a day, was it ? Are you married, by the way ? ” 

“No, I am not married. You are? ” Voysey asked, feel- 
ing that these confidences called for some show of interest as 
an acknowledgment. 

“ I have been married four years. We have one little 
boy. My wife is here to-night. I should like to introduce 
you to her.” 

“ Thanks very much,” said Voysey, who, not having caught 
Mrs. Detmond’s name, was not aware that he had already 
enjoyed that privilege. “ If I hadn’t just said good-night to 
Mrs. Harrington, I should have been delighted.” 

“ Well, I’ll come and look you up. And you must come 
and see us. I should like you to know my wife. Here’s 
where we live.” And Voysey received a card which he 
passed to his waistcoat pocket. At the same time he offered 
one of his own. 

“Well, good-night, Voysey,” he said. “I shall come and 
look you up in a day or two. And you must come and see us.” 
Whereupon the plenteous figure moved away in the direction 
of the door that gave access to the larger drawing-room. 

Voysey returned to the landing. As he paused a moment 
at the top of the stairs to allow some ladies who were leaving 
to go by, he heard a voice — a rather deep girl’s voice, which 
he recognized as Miss Harrington’s — say at his elbow. 


H 


VOYSEY 


“ Is Mr. Detmond an old friend of yours, Mr. Voysey ^ ” 

Voysey laughed. 

“ No : I used to meet him sometimes in the rooms of a 
friend of mine at Oxford. I can’t say I knew him. They 
used to call him Caesar.” 

“ C^sar ? Why ? ” 

‘‘ Oh, I don’t know : I suppose because he looked rather 
like a genial burlesque of a Roman hero. It’s odd he should 
have greeted me in that particular way.” 

I think Mr. Detmond would be rather nice-looking, if he 
weren’t — weren’t that colour,” the girl said. “ At all events, 
he doesn’t forget people.” 

Voysey smiled. 

“ What is the matter. Cissy ? ” he asked. 

The girl looked at him a moment with those old eyes of 
hers, and her expression changed a little. 

“ Has it been very slow ? ” she inquired. 

“ No ; I think it has gone off very well,” was the consider- 
ate assurance he gave her. 

The old eyes were still looking at him, and he read, or 
fancied he read, the signs of an unexpressed wish in them. 

“ I must be off,” he cried, a trifle abruptly. “ I said good- 
night to your mother about an hour ago.” 

‘‘ Good-night,” she answered, simply, giving him her hand. 

He left her, and went down the easy stairs, aware, as he 
turned on the small landing before the second flight, that the 
eyes of the girl were still following him. 


II 


The light from the small copper lamp on its iron pedestal 
fell upon the books and papers at which the girl was working, 
and lay upon the lower halves of two photographs which, 
together with the other ornaments on the table, had been put 
in disorder by the books; — but the shade on the lamp threw 
the girl’s face in shadow. The table stood in a recess by the 
fire-place, and the length of the room was behind her. The 
room was a drawing-room, — of to-day, yet furnished with a 
taste that was not too modern ; indeed two or three anachro- 
nisms had been permitted to survive in it, relics of an incorrigi- 
ble past. The tall floor-lamp with the volumes of its shade 
had not been lighted, so that the medley of copper and silver 
and inlaid things, with the books and photographs and flowers, 
was covered by a grateful obscurity : at the end furthest from 
the girl the shadows had gathered ; the gas-lamp on the pave- 
ment outside made gleams upon the furthest blind. The 
books, most of them new books, some of them books with 
yellow labels on their covers, were many, and the note of 
to-day which they struck was repeated — could they have been 
discerned — in the delicate little water-colours on the walls. 
Two of the three high windows in the room were open, and 
with the cool of the deepening night came the endless mur- 
mur of the city, broken by the near sound of hoofs when a 
vehicle passed over the wood pavement below the windows, 
the noise of the wheels becoming audible with a kind of sudden 
little crash, upon the macadam, at a little distance down the 
road. The room was full of flowers, and, in its cool dimness, 
was wonderfully fresh and sweet. 

15 


i6 


VOYSEY 


At the girl’s end of the room, on the other side of the fire- 
place, a lady of any age was reading by the light of two shaded 
candles. Her figure was slight and stiff, and the tension of 
her attitude, considering the comfort of her seat, appeared 
slightly unwarrantable. Her smooth hair was divided by a 
long, very definite parting, and was drawn just over the tips of 
her ears in the manner in which hair was apt to be drawn in 
the days when the room was first furnished. In a fanciful way 
her face revived this aspect of the room ; one was inclined to 
think her face had once been prim, though it now possessed a 
brightness, a cheerful look of alertness and interest, which 
showed that she lived in the present, and perhaps, in a quiet 
sense, even lived rather vividly. In her small, intelligent, well- 
bred features there was a curious expression of eagerness — the 
eagerness, it might be, of a person for whom life was still rich 
in discoveries ; together with an odd little look of determina- 
tion as if she were bent upon making them. She wore a dress 
the quality of whose material atoned for any failure it might 
show in conformity to the passing fashion ; the two thin gold 
chains of her watch hung from the gold pin of her brooch. 
She was reading a sixpenny literary newspaper, and the enjoy- 
ment with which she read it kept her lips slightly parted with 
a smile. And for a reason it would not have been easy to 
define, any one — any one, that is, who had a gift in such 
matters — would have known the room was not hers. 

“ It is very clever,” she said, leaning back in her chair with 
a movement of self-indulgence induced by her interest. “They 
write wonderfully well.” 

For a moment or two the girl was too busy to answer; she 
was bending over the formidable columns of a dictionary. 
When, however, it had yielded the information she sought, she 
turned to her aunt (the maiden lady was her aunt — and the 
name of both ladies was Voysey) as if she intended to listen, 
but the absent look in her eyes, and the unconscious way in 


VOYSEY 


17 


which she held her pen at her lips, suggested that the big book 
still kept her interest. 

“It is wonderfully clever,” Miss Voysey repeated. “They 
put things so wonderfully well. Doesn’t Herbert’s friend, 
Arthur James, write for the Final Review ? ” 

“ I think he does. He was here the day I came down from 
Cambridge.” 

“ Arthur James ? I suppose he is very amusing ? ” 

“ Yes ; I suppose he is.” 

“ What did they talk about ? ” 

“ Books.” 

A smile of sympathy and of imagined enjoyment, as of one 
who sits in fancy at an intellectual feast, lighted the elder 
lady’s face. For clever people, and especially the clever 
people who talk about books, she almost acknowledged her 
weakness. 

“ What books did they talk about ? ” 

“ I scarcely remember. French books, I think.” 

The smile waned a little. Miss Voysey did not read French 
books. 

“ Did they talk about no English books ? ” 

The girl thought for a moment or two. “Yes; I think 
they talked about a book Mr. James was going to review.” 

The smile grew radiant. “ How interesting ! I wonder 
what book it was.” 

“ I have forgotten. He was going to cut it up.” 

Miss Voysey laughed. Her enjoyment was vivid. It could 
scarcely have been more vivid if she had been present at the 
feast. To be let in this way into the secrets of the Final 
Review gave her a full sense of being “ in it”; and she keenly 
relished being “ in it.” 

“ It must have been very amusing,” she said. 

For a moment the girl’s eyes rested upon her aunt with a 
look suggestive of a slight reservation ; then, with a sudden 
c 


8 


VOYSEY 


change of manner, she put down her pen, her face as frankly 
interested as that lady’s. 

‘‘Yes,” she said, “it was very amusing. Mr. James is 
splendid. I love hearing them talk.” 

Miss Voysey’s smile still showed her interest. 

“ I love hearing about things,” the girl went on ; “ all sorts 
of interesting things — things that make one feel alive.” 

“ One likes to see things from a new point of view,” said 
Miss Voysey. 

“ Ah, it is hardly that with Mr. James, I think. At times, 
in a way, he is rather old-fashioned. He is inclined to go for 
some things.” 

“ I suppose the Final Review is a little like that,” Miss 
Voysey reflected. 

“ I don’t know. I don’t read it,” the girl said. 

“ Herbert’s friends, as a rule, are not old-fashioned,” sug- 
gested Miss Voysey. 

Herbert’s sister laughed. “ Not as a rule, certainly.” 

“ It is very amusing to hear them talk. And sometimes — 
rather disturbing.” 

“ They have a sort of way of saying the opposite of what 
one hears in church,” the girl laughed. 

“ Yes ; I am afraid Herbert is rather like that.” 

The girl’s face grew graver. “ Bertie is different,” she 
said. “ He has so many sides.” 

Miss Voysey drew back : the understanding between the 
girl and her brother was of a kind that made criticism a deli- 
cate business. And, moreover, she had no especial wish to 
be critical. Her many-sided nephew appealed to her — her 
name was on the roll of his worshippers. She returned to her 
newspaper, unconscious, poor lady, that it was persons like 
herself, persons of her random and chasing lights, who afforded 
the young men who wrote for that paper some of their choic- 
est opportunities for merriment. 


VOYSEY 


19 


Miss Voysey was suffering from a mind that had expanded 
too late. It seemed as if, in her case, two or three of the 
earlier stages of development had been omitted. The daughter 
of a clever man, and the sister of a man who had proved to 
be a good deal cleverer, she had not been allowed to profit by 
the intellectual opportunities of her girlhood. Her father had 
put her mentally on a level with her mother, and that level, 
as he would often complain when his own powers were espe- 
cially active, even to imagine involved humiliation. In these 
conditions the girl’s mind had not grown. She had been left 
to her mother, a lady with a good manner but no kind of effi- 
ciency, who, after her husband’s death, proclaimed — and here 
perhaps she threw some doubt upon the justness of his per- 
ceptions — her aversion from all mental superiority. The 
girl had received a graceful education at the establishment of 
two maiden ladies at Brighton. She had not married, and in 
the middle twenties she had become prim. And it is just at 
this point that the interest of her story begins. At twenty- 
six she was prim — prim, rather pretty, obvious, unapproach- 
able. She offered no provocation to marriage ; it occurred to 
no one that anything would be gained by marrying her. And 
a day came — that day of dreadful illumination which comes 
alas ! to so many sensible women — when her eyes were 
opened, and she looked straight down the empty vista of the 
years of spinsterhood before her. From that day — though 
this of course is putting it too dramatically : the enlighten- 
ment was a gradual process — her life changed. An immense 
readjustment had to be effected ; a new point of view, a new 
moral and mental reason for being had, if possible, to be dis- 
covered. And it was her exceptional good fortune, a good 
fortune that made all the difference between her future and 
that of so many other women in her case, that this search 
of hers was successful. She touched the solution when she 
subscribed to a better library, and paid an extra subscription 


20 


VOYSEY 


for the reading-room. The books she read were mainly 
novels j but one thing led to another, and her quickening 
curiosity brought her at last to find her account in the half-a- 
crown magazines. In the meantime her mother, from sheer 
feebleness, from sheer want of a more reasonable interest, had 
drifted into an invalid ; her life had become one long queru- 
lousness with slight variations from day to day. Her daugh- 
ter nursed and bore with her with astonishing patience; her 
life in their little villa at Torquay was one that, to more for- 
tunate persons, would have seemed immeasurably depressing. 
In reality, her life grew brighter ; the consciousness of a want 
of success that had spoiled her girlhood, the depression of feel- 
ing oneself a perpetual loser in the race, passed quietly away ; 
instead of being an unsuccessful competitor she became an 
amused looker-on : while the failure of her mother’s powers, 
and her limitation of them exclusively to herself, completed 
her daughter’s emancipation. Miss Voysey gave herself the 
latitude of a middle-aged woman, and used it to gain all sorts 
of conversational experiences. Her opportunities were sadly 
limited ; her friends at Torquay were not conversationally 
enterprising : but from time to time she met wanderers from 
a larger world, who gave her new thoughts and ideas which 
helped her. 

Unquestionably the person who helped her most was her 
own brother. Dr. Voysey, the Dr. Voysey, the Dr. Voysey of 
Harley Street. From time to time she would stay with him, 
and from time to time he came to Torquay. And with him 
she always heard much talk. It would be too much to say 
that he gave her his point of view. Dr. Voysey’s was not a 
point of view to be imparted ; but the thought of his judg- 
ments, his corrections, remained with her, and helped her to 
steer over the perilous sea. It was he who encouraged her 
to make the most of that little touch of humour, that appre- 
ciation of a certain lightness in the handling of questions. 


VOYSEY 


2 


which kept her mind detached, and which, in the case of a 
middle-aged lady anxious for culture, is a trait so much to be 
desired. As we have seen, she had humour enough, and not 
too much humour, to enjoy her Final Review, 

Miss Voysey again put down the paper. 

“ I suppose it is getting late,” she said. Have you nearly 
finished, Nellie ? ” 

The girl sighed. “ Is a Greek chorus ever finished, do you 
think? No — I must wait for Bertie.” 

“ You want him to help you, I suppose.” 

“ I wanted him to help me a lot. I’m stuck.” 

Miss Voysey smiled. The atmosphere was congenial to 
her. She had been living in a congenial atmosphere ever 
since she had joined the household of her orphan nephew and 
niece : that is to say, during the last three years. PYr it had 
been decided, upon Dr. Voysey’s death, that the home in 
Harley Street should be continued, and Miss Voysey, herself 
in want of a home owing to the death of her mother, had 
consented to make the arrangement possible by her presence. 
The arrangement had worked. Miss Voysey managed the 
household ; the young people directed it. 

Still now, just for a moment, she was inclined to hesitate. 
The hour was late. It was a fact of which it was desirable 
some kind of notice should be taken. 

Herbert is not going on anywhere after the Harringtons’, 
is he ? ” she asked. 

“ No ; he said he was coming straight back.” 

“ Then I dare say he will be here in half-an-hour or so.” 

‘‘ He is not likely to stay very late at the Harringtons’.” 

And Miss Voysey there let the matter rest. There were 
certain things, she knew, which might be said concerning late 
hours, and said with especial force at the present moment, be- 
cause Nell, who had been overworking herself at Cambridge, 
had come down for a few days’ rest ; but between her niece 


22 


VOYSEY 


and herself there was a little understanding touching these 
things — a little agreement that they should not be said. 

‘‘ Well,” she continued, rising, and collecting her small 
belongings — a book or two, a work-basket, another basket 
which held her knitting — ‘‘I think I shall leave you. Nel- 
son has brought the tray, I see.” And with the bright little 
movements natural to her, she went down into the shadows at 
the other end of the room to inspect it. “ I think you will 
do well to help Herbert with the sandwiches. There is a 
better supply to-night. I must try to keep Anne up to it.” 

“Anne needs a good deal of keeping up. She is very tire- 
some about giving one things to eat — when one comes home, 
I mean.” 

Miss Voysey returned. 

■“ I think I won’t blow out the candles,” she said. “ The 
room will look so ghostly with only that lamp.” 

The girl turned on her chair, and peered into the shadows 
behind her. “ It does look rather ghostly,” she said. 

Miss Voysey paused a moment. “ Would you like me to 
stay with you till Herbert comes in ? ” 

Nell shook her head. “ I like sitting up alone at night. 
There is a sort of eeriness in it. I like listening to the 
noises in the street, hearing the hansoms roll by. I think 
they sound mysterious somehow — and rather wicked.” 

Miss Voysey came over to the girl, and kissed her, glancing 
down as she did so at the page of her open book. 

“ Ah, it looks hard,” she said. 

“ It is abominably hard,” said the girl. “ I am completely 
stumped.” 

Miss Voysey kissed her again, and then, her arms full of 
her small belongings, passed from the room. 


Ill 


Between the girl’s words and the girl herself, there seemed 
to be a certain discrepancy. If she had not told you, you 
would by no means have supposed she was likely to feel any 
especial attraction to the eerie, nor even, perhaps, to the 
mysterious ; while wickedness of any sort or kind appeared a 
thing pleasantly remote from her. The impression she gave 
you was one of wholesomeness and vigour, of abounding life 
and vitality ; her physical robustness, even four years before, 
when, at sixteen, she had paid her last visit to Torquay, had 
gravely startled her grandmother. For Mrs. Voysey died 
true to the ideals of her girlhood; her first requirement of a 
girl was grace, as her last, possibly, was graciousness ; she 
was not to be persuaded that the absence of these qualities 
to-day is atoned for by the possession of others. “ She can’t 
walk,” she would say of a girl ; “ she lurches across the room 
like a ship at sea” — and the objection appeared to her final. 
A girl who, like her grand-daughter, ceased to play the piano 
at fourteen, referred always to books when she talked of her 
“ work ” — never to silks nor wools, spoke flippantly of 
p'rench and solemnly of the higher mathematics, read extraor- 
dinary novels, and proclaimed the fact with an innocence 
quite as extraordinary ; who could swim, who played cricket, 
who got as brown as a berry, who weighed more stone than 
it was really quite delicate to think of, was a being for whom 
she could conceive no destiny — beyond that of administering 
endless shocks to the system of similar old ladies. 

But Mrs. Voysey, when her grand-daughter knew her, 
made but an indifferent apology for her own principles. 

23 


24 


VOYSEY 


Grace, the girl admitted, might not be the leading trait of 
her contemporaries and herself, but their old age, she fancied, 
would not be so ungracious as that. Altogether, in body 
and mind, the girl was of her own generation. Now, at 
twenty, it seemed to her that the world, her world, the world 
of her observation and knowledge, had begun less than ten 
years before. Her thought, consciously and unconsciously, 
was steeped in a sense of change ; she thought, more often 
than she knew, in terms of contrast and comparison. One 
may expect perhaps to feel in sympathy a trifle removed 
from one’s grandmother, but Nell found herself almost as 
widely divided from many women but a few years older. 
She had lost the feeling for their small pieties, their small 
discretions, for the self-imposed incompleteness and ineffi- 
ciency of which she was expected to appreciate the motive ; 
she had become intolerant of the ambiguities (or at least of 
some of the ambiguities) in which the ever present conscious- 
ness of sex appeared to wrap the lives of such women. And 
they had no feeling for her small devotions ; the seriousness, 
with which she took her college and her lecturers and all 
that the world of her college stood for, seemed to them tire- 
some and oppressive ; behind the looseness of her speech, the 
desire for varied experience she acknowledged so freely, lay a 
standard curiously high, a sense of obligation towards the 
best, the best in every direction, which had the inconvenience 
of all attempts at superiority *, the clearness and definiteness 
of her mental atmosphere repelled them as unsympathetic and 
hard. A purer, nicer-minded girl never breathed, but new 
readings of the meaning of things are scribbled all over the 
book of our life of to-day, and with Nell, as with most other 
girls, some sight of these readings had caught her eye. And 
older women, committed to simpler interpretations, divined in 
her silence a movement of awakening criticism. 

Many carriages had passed the house, the gay sociable 


VOYSEY 


25 


suggestions they gave — for the year stood at the month of 
May, and most of the coming and going implied the passing 
of people from gathering to gathering, from crowd to crowd 
— working themselves with curious effect into the denunci- 
atory aspirations of the old Greek chorus with which the girl 
so bravely contended, when the sound on the wood pavement, 
of the hoofs of a horse abruptly pulled up under the window, 
told Nell her brother had returned. In a very few minutes 
Voysey appeared in the drawing-room. 

He paused for a moment by the door, looking through the 
shadows towards the table in the recess by the fire-place, 
where the lamp, just hidden by the girl’s figure, made a space 
of brightness about her. She raised her head, but did not 
turn round. 

“ Nell, you bad girl, why aren’t you in bed ? ” 

“ I’m stuck. I want you to help me.” 

“ I could have helped you to-morrow.” 

“ It worries me. I want to finish it to-night.” 

“ And this is your idea of a rest ! You overdo it and have 
to come down in the middle of term, and then by way of 
getting yourself right ” 

“ Oh, bother, Bertie ! Just come here.” 

Voysey crossed the room, and went to the table, and laying 
his hand on the girl’s shoulder, leaned forward to look at the 
book. 

“ Yes, I remember that chorus,” he said. It is pretty 
stiff.” Then drawing himself up, he added, “ But I must 
have something to eat first. I am hungry. And I think I’ll 
change my coat, and get some cigarettes.” 

After an absence of five minutes or so, he returned, his 
dress-coat exchanged for an old Norfolk jacket, and began 
to examine the tray. 

“ A sandwich, Nell ? ” 

Nell, who was still bending over her book, for an interval 


26 


VOYSEY 


did not answer ; then, on a sudden leaning back in her chair, 
she pushed the book impatiently from her, and sprang up. 

“I don’t believe it has any meaning,” she said. “I am 
sick of it. A sandwich ? — yes; what are they? Are they 
nice ? ” 

“ Bring a candle, will you ? I can’t see what is in this 
decanter. It looks like ” 

“ I expect it is whiskey. Ah, Nelson has brought the syphon 
— good! Give me a little seltzer-water, will you? And oh, 
my brother — let us eat I ” With a movement partly prompted 
by affection, and partly due to the need of a small breaking 
out after so many hours of the books, she threw her arm round 
her brother, and leaned on him, the gentle addition of her 
weight bringing the glass he had just taken up somewhat vio- 
lently against the syphon. “Take care,” he said. “ Eleven 
stone are no trifle ” 

“ Don’t, Bertie. I don’t weigh eleven stone.” 

“The Woman of the Future is going to weigh more than 
that.” 

“ I don’t think she will, if she has to go in for exams.” 

By and by, when the sandwiches and the other opportu- 
nities of the tray were done with, Voysey leaned back in the 
chair from whose ease his aunt had drawn such indifferent 
comfort, and lighted his first cigarette. 

“ Ugh I I am tired,” he said. 

“ Why did you go to the Harringtons’ ? ” 

The smoke rose in silence. “ Where is one to draw the 
line ? ” 

“ At people who bore you.” 

“ No doubt. But who do bore one ? ” 

“ Stupid people : uninteresting people.” 

“ Not always, j' Who is uninteresting ? Who is interest- 
ing ? It depends upon one’s humour. The brightest person : 
may bore you if you are not in the humour for him.” 


VOYSEY 


27 


‘‘You met no one this evening who interested you ? ” 

“ No one at all.” 

“And yet — you are not particularly early.” 

“ No ; I stayed longer than I intended.” 

“ I am very thirsty still,” said the girl. “ I must have some 
more seltzer-water.” 

“ I will get it for you. The syphon is rather queer.” And 
he pulled himself up, and paid the tray another little visit. 

“You saw Cissy, I suppose ? ” 

“I talked to her for a minute or two before I came away.” 

“ She looked pretty, as usual ? ” 

“ Prettier than usual, if anything.” 

“ How was she dressed ? ” 

“ In something faintly green and indefinite that just showed 
her neck, and had a good deal of lace. She looked very 
pretty.” 

Nell moved on her seat a little — she was sitting in shadow 
— and turned to him, a wealth of observation in her eyes. He 
blew the smoke from his lips, and smiled as he flicked the ash 
of his cigarette on to one of the yellow-labelled novels between 
the candles on the table at his elbow. 

“ I prefer Cissy’s mother,” he said. 

Nell smiled too. 

“ One knows so very well where Cissy would take one. 
Cissy is so perfectly definite.” 

“ Definite is not exactly what I should have called her.” 

“ I don’t mean that she is ingenuous. Cissy is not ingenu- 
ous. I dare say I am wrong, but I fancy Cissy seldom wears 
white. She has been out about six months, I suppose: — she 
might have been out ten years. She is making a little atmos- 
phere of her own. She has her pet idioms; she is full of 
perversities in her likes and dislikes which she hopes are orig- 
inal ; she struggles to get away from the crowd. But in the 
end what does it amount to ! Cissy doesn’t get away from 


28 


VOYSEY 


the crowd — not two inches further than her mother. She 
is only a few degrees more self-conscious, and a good many 
degrees less committed.” 

“ Is that what you call being definite ? ” 

“ Her end is so obvious ! The little flat (in the very eligi- 
ble quarter, of course), the pretty rooms, the pretty gowns, the 
worship of the last idea — always, in everything, it will be the 
last, the newest, the latest ; the interesting people, the people 
who do things, act, write, paint, talk — or fancy they write or 
paint or talk. . . . Cissy will never know the people who 
can. Unless one were quite sure of the interest of one’s own 
contribution, isn’t it an end towards which it might prove just 
a little rash to follow her ? ” 

The girl laughed. “ I think it sounds rather nice.” 

“ Oh, there is something to be said for it.” 

“ It doesn’t sound bad.” 

“ It is not bad. For Cissy it will be perfect.” 

“ Bertie — what is it you want ? ” cried the girl impetuously. 
His head was resting on the low back of his chair, as he 
lay, his legs extended before him, stretched at full length : — 
he looked at Nell. “ Certainly,” he said, “ I think one does 
want something more than that.” 

“ But not more than some one who cares ? ” 

“ Ah, you shouldn’t put it like that ! It is pressing one 
much too hard. You cut off one’s retreat.” 

“ But if you cared ? ” 

“Why, that is pressing one ever so much harder still ! ” 

He raised his head, and dropped his ash again on the yellow- 
labelled book at his elbow. Nell looked at him. “ You are 

a bewildering old thing, Bertie,” she sighed. “Look here 

have you ever cared for any one ? ” 

He laughed. “ Heavens ! What a question ! ” 

“ But have you ? ” 

“ My dear Nell, you corner me ! ” 


VOYSEY 


29 


“ I believe you never have, and you never will ! ” 

‘‘ Ah, you are going too fast.” 

“ I don’t believe you ever will.” 

‘‘ There is still time, you know. I have another year or 
two.” 

“ And to think of all the ‘ lovely ’ women you have met ! 
I mean, as the Americans say.” 

‘‘ Spare me, spare me,” he protested. “ Such a picture of 
insensibility is too much.” 

“You are so desperately analytical, you know.” 

“ These emotions provoke one to analyze them. They are 
so curious.” 

“You are all analysis.” 

“ Not quite : flesh and blood have their say sometimes.” 

“ One is glad to know it.” 

A look which the girl did not see and would not have 
understood if she had seen, crossed the young man’s face. 
“ Quite often enough for one’s comfort,” he added. 

“ It is all sad somehow.” 

“ My inability to do justice to Cissy ? ” 

“ Oh, Cissy . . . No, Cissy doesn’t count. But, you 
know — I don’t know how it is — you have a way of making 
things seem sad.” 

“ You discourage me.” 

“ Father was like that.” 

Voysey’s expression changed. He moved in his chair a 
little, and looked towards the table at which Nell had been 
working, and at one of the photographs by the books upon 
which the lamplight fell. 

“ I expect you have it there,” he said. 

He rose, and went to the table, and took up the photograph. 
He stood for some moments looking at it. “ It is a wonder- 
ful likeness,” he said. “ What a wonderful face he had ! I 
suppose,” he went on, “the strength of the features — the 


30 


VOYSEY 


brow, the lines by the nose and mouth, were not very difficult 
to get; but the man has caught that strange, strange haunting 
expression he sometimes had, the expression I always see him 
with. . . . Ah, and he did haunt me,’’ he added. “ All 
through my childhood he haunted me.” 

He put down the photograph by the books lying in the 
lamplight, and took up the other. It was the portrait of a 
lady, dressed in the fashion of some years ago, sitting by a 
table, a small boy standing by her side. 

“ Poor little fellow ! ” he murmured. “ Sturdy, common- 
place, altogether uninteresting little boy ! Who would sup- 
pose, to look at you, you could have suffered so much ! ” He 
went back to his chair. “ No,” he went on, “ the days of 
our youth are distinctly not the days of our glory. My child- 
hood was haunted : haunted by all manner of perverse and 
morbid imaginings : it is not a joyful time to look back upon. 
And I believe, for me, this house will always be more or less 
haunted.” 

“ Bertie ! ” 

“ By the doomed and stricken company who used to make 
that sombre procession morning after morning across the hall. 
Can’t you see them ? Can’t you hear the peculiar recurrent 
noise of the bell, and see Nelson, our suave, imperturbable, 
sallow-cheeked Nelson, letting them in ? I can see them now 
just as I saw them as a small boy when we met them as we 
crossed the hall when Miss Humphrey took us for a walk. 
They horribly seized my imagination — those unknown lam- 
entable faces. Their decency, their self-control in a situation 
I thought so tremendous, oppressed me with awe. The small 
boy added himself to the hopeless company, and — no, he did 
not show himself conspicuously heroic. The faces used to 
come back ; at night — the shadows at night grew full of 
them. And in a kind of way it seems to me sometimes they 
have a right to come back, the ghosts of that multitude of 


VOYSEY 


31 


hopes and fears. They have a claim on us ; it was they who 
made our fortune. And when one comes to think of it, 
seeing that we are all ‘ Condamnes d mort^ '‘les hom?nes sont tons 
condarnnes d mort^ is there not something a little monstrous in 
one of the condemned making so very good a thing out of the 
mortality of the others ? If they did haunt us, there would 
be an odd sort of justice in it. One’s instinct claims some 
redressing of the balance.” 

‘‘ I am going, Bertie. If I listen to you much longer, I 
shall see something. If the house is haunted, it is a reason 
for not talking about ghosts.” 

“ And our chorus ? ” 

‘‘ It must go.” 

“ You start by an early train to-morrow ? ” 

“ Not a very early train. I shan’t be up very early after 
this.” 

‘‘ Good. I am not going to bed just yet. I am going 
down into the study ” 

“ Oh, horror, among the ghosts ! ” 

“Among the ghosts — and I will take your Sophocles with 
me. You shall have a translation of your chorus in the 
morning.” 

“Bertie; you’re a disturbing old creature,” Nell declared, 
“ but you are good-natured.” And she kissed him. 

He accepted the kiss. 

“ My good-nature will be my undoing,” he said. 


IV 


The ghosts about which Voysey had talked to his sister, 
whatever they might once have been, were now but a whimsi- 
cal conception : there was a whimsical, fanciful side to him. 
His nerves still played him tricks at times, but they were not 
the kind of trick that produces actual hallucination. And 
still to-night when Nell had left him, and he had gone down 
alone into the study, where once Dr. Voysey had seen his 
patients, the room for him was genuinely haunted; haunted 
not by the returning spirits of the unhappy people who had 
known such supreme moments of hope and despair within it, 
but by that sense of the abiding nearness of the miseries and 
terrors of existence which the associations of the room always 
gave him. Most of Dr. Voysey’s instruments and appliances 
had been disposed of, but his solid, many-drawered writing- 
table stood in its old place, and in a corner was the wicker- 
chair which had once stood beside it, so placed that the light 
of the large window had fallen upon the patients’ faces. Op- 
posite the window, against the folding-doors which separated 
this room from the dining-room, was the bookcase, its shelves 
still heavy with ominously entitled volumes, volumes sugges- 
tive of terrible human possibilities ; the door on the window 
side of the room opened into a small chamber in which, if 
the door was left ajar, the patient in the wicker-chair caught 
sight of a couch which seemed designed for a melancholy 
usage : there were few pictures on the walls, the print over 
the chimney-piece being the portrait of an Italian gentleman, 
whose face with the baffling eyes, sunken cheeks, full lips, 

32 


VOYSEY 


33 


thin scattered beard, had a sinister expression of refinement. 
It was a portrait attributed to Lionardo da Vinci, and, no 
doubt, attributed too lightly; but there was a riddle in the 
joyless long drooping eye that lent the conjecture plausibility. 
Beyond the books on the shelves there was little that re- 
called the uses to which the room had once been given ; but 
for Voysey it never lost its associations, and to-night, after 
the varied experiences of the evening, after the lights and 
colour of the party, his drive through the moving, restless, 
populous London night, and his talk with Nell whose life was 
to him an embodiment of so much promise, the room’s still 
and shadowy quiet appeared to his stirred fancy peculiarly 
sinister, malevolent, ironical. 

He had lighted the green-shaded reading-lamp on the writ- 
ing-table, and seated himself in the round low-backed leathern 
arm-chair, Nell’s Sophocles and her big dictionary disposed on 
the blotting-paper before him ; but his imagination was active, 
his attention refused to be fixed, and after leaning back for 
some time in his chair, he got up and paced the room. 

“ I am no good to-night,” he murmured. “ I have no 
brains left. Nell must get what she can from the translation 
I have up-stairs.” 

He paused by and by at the chimney-piece, and leaning 
near a cup that stood on it, a prize for a race he had won at 
school, he looked up at the Italian, whose features were 
scarcely to be distinguished in the dimness of the imperfect 
light ; the troubling face with its refinement, its resolution, its 
possible cruelty, had always had a perverse fascination for him. 
What would this man of the Renaissance, he sometimes won- 
dered, this man who had listened, perhaps, to the lute of 
Lionardo at the court of the Sforzi, or been present at the 
entertainment of a Borgia, have made of the unfulfilled desires 
and forced hesitations of the daunted sinners of to-day ? The 
slight absurdity of the reflection amused him, and he laughed 


34 


VOYSEY 


as he threw himself into an arm-chair by the empty grate, 
and gave his imagination its way. 

The question Nell had asked with such humorous direct- 
ness a little while before in the drawing-room suddenly came 
back, and though he was amused by remembering the gravity 
of her face when she had asked it, he found that the question 
had seized him. So far, he was inclined to say, he had not 
known the great experience ; would it ever come to him to 
know it ? Would it ever come to him to “ care ’’ ? It was 
an intimate and delicate inquiry, and one a man can seldom 
pursue without drawing perilously near to the fatuous. But 
he admitted he had his misgivings : he recognized an attrac- 
tion to the Something More, an attraction he almost feared 
to the Impossible, as a fact of his temperament by which — 
he did venture as far as this — the great experience might be 
postponed. His memory strayed back into the past. He 
went back to the days of his boyhood. It was a conviction 
of his, and returns of this kind would strengthen it, that he 
must have been a very uncomfortable little boy. And a very 
uncomfortable little boy he had been, though uncomfortable 
mainly to himself. He had not been precocious; he had not 
been different, in most ways, perhaps, from other children of 
the sensitive kind ; he rightly reappeared in his visions of those 
times as a sturdy, hardy little fellow on the whole, though one 
constrained by certain timidities. There had, however, been 
an unhappy strain in his nature; if one did not hesitate to use 
the word of a child, one would say he had suffered from some 
trouble of the nerves. A sense of apprehension had been 
almost constantly with him : a dread which was often obscure, 
vague, elusive, as it were a dread of the dark persisting in the 
broadest daylight ; but a dread which at other times was defi- 
nite — if still fantastic — enough. One of the most absurd 
of the many absurd forms it took was the fear that for so long 
a time had come in between himself and his father. The child 


VOYSEY 


35 


had lived in perpetual distrust of his father ; he had been 
guilty of who shall say how much naughtiness in his small 
attempts at avoiding him. And the reason had been that 
he was in constant terror lest his father should examine and 
doom him by discovering some dreadful disease. 

“ Absurd little boy ! ” he murmured : — and still he was 
sorry for his perverse little self. 

Looking back at his school-days, and at the first years of 
manhood that followed, it appeared to him almost impossible 
to find the word with which to sum them up. He had a 
horror of posing. Whatever else he had gained from school 
and college (he had gone up to Oxford upon leaving school), 
they had given him a lively aversion from sounding false 
notes, a sensitiveness to all forms of eccentricity and exag- 
geration. Indeed he wondered sometimes whether he had not 
lived a little too much in the sunshine of the commonplace, 
whether there had not been some want of courage perhaps in 
his preference for the normal and unobserved. Certainly — he 
had thrown his cap over very few windmills. He had never 
— to put the matter in a rather different light — been a young 
man to wear a red tie. And it was just this that made the 
difficulty of arranging his old experiences, of getting them, as 
it were, into focus. Outwardly, he had always conformed — 
conformed to the point of succeeding (he had done as well at 
the university as he had done before he went up to it) ; while 
inwardly, in spite of a growing sense of proportion, of the 
fetters of education and habit, of a clinging to the amenities 
of taste and manners and form that had tended to dull the 
edge of enthusiasm, of a belief that if the world was colos- 
sally wrong — and he had had that belief very deeply — too 
many of the remedies proposed were portentously hazardous, 
there had been a bewildering confusion of generous aspira- 
tions, passionate desires, perverse imaginings, — revolts from 
the tyranny of the established, with at all times a sense of 


36 


VOYSEY 


injury at the hands of, and a yearning to bring home a sense 
of their limitations to, all the people who make too sure : — 
while inwardly there had been strife in his mind and perpetual 
war in his members. 

War in his members. . . . Should he laugh or weep ? 
Laugh at those primitive instincts, those undignified needs, 
which we are all so desperately anxious to hide, and which, 
for that reason, have contributed so abundantly to the humour 
of the literatures of all ages ? Or should he weep ? — weep 
at the very real sufferings which the struggles with himself 
had brought him, and at the memory of that nostalgie de purete 
which had followed after all his falls ? 

And the thought of these things brought him to the thought 
of his father. As his nerves had strengthened, and reason had 
come to control imagination, that grotesque estrangement from 
his father had disappeared : an intimate friendship had ripened 
between them. They had talked about these things, and 
they had talked remarkably freely. In this, as in everything 
else. Dr. Voysey encouraged a breadth of view. He gave the 
young fellow counsels of wisdom, counsels of prudence, coun- 
sels of moderation ; but he seldom gave him a counsel of per- 
fection. Harmony of development, rather than any kind of 
perfection, made the doctor’s working ideal. This attitude 
of his father appealed to Voysey by its perfect frankness, its 
perfect sanity ; and, at the same time, it slightly repelled him, 
for at bottom he was something of an idealist. With a nature 
as strong, and as perfectly adjusted as his father’s, even a large 
measure of indulgence might produce no grave disturbance of 
the balance; but, for himself, he knew it was different; he 
had not sufficient control over memory and imagination to 
keep the two sides of his nature distinct. He could not put 
down the one book, and read quite calmly in the other. 

The thought of the intimacy with his father constantly 
stirred his imagination. His father’s adequacy, his complete- 


VOYSEY 


37 


ness, fascinated him. He had had a superb gift for being 
right — or, at all events, he had had a most superb gift for 
being interesting. There had been times, as he knew, when 
Dr. Voysey’s professional position had been a good deal can- 
vassed : people had liked to say that ‘‘ though a royal cure 
may account for a practice, it will not justify a reputation ” ; 
and to point out that there is no profession in which a man 
is not advanced by marrying a banker’s daughter. ' But no one 
who had known him well, no one who had fairly tried to take 
his measure, either socially or in his profession, had ever 
doubted his power. For this suggestion of power never left 
him. It gave his personality its most distinctive note. He 
was fond of society, and his strong, alert, middle-aged figure 
— alert, yet carried with a certain guardedness — moved 
easily in the artificial setting of a drawing-room. If his man- 
ner was scarcely to be called courtly, it was only because it 
was too human, too modern, too flexible ; because his speech, 
in spite of its habitual discretion, retained a natural virility. 
He had the tact and sureness of touch in conversation, which 
are so much more common with women than with men. He 
seldom laughed, but his appreciation of humour (and his own 
was abundant) appeared in the curious working of his brows. 
And still his personality, even though it had taken possession 
of him, had never seemed to Voysey exactly oppressive. It 
was saved by his humour, and by the rather bizarre strain of 
diablerie by which his humour was characterized. The range 
of his knowledge was wonderful. He could talk — it was 
one of his smaller vanities to talk — of books of the cheapest 
popularity ; and when the interest deepened, and the book or 
the question became a trifle difficult or removed, he found a 
humorous, half-mischievous amusement in springing unex- 
pected little mines of erudition. But what gave his conversa- 
tion its penetrating flavour, and his personality the fascination 
which no one denied him, was the strain of intimate sinister 


38 


VOYSEY 


perception that ran through all the workings of his mind. 
He was never crude j he was never monotonous; he pos- 
sessed a most delicate sense of times and seasons. He adjusted 
his conversational shocks with nicety to the requirements of 
the individual temperament. But his shocks, nevertheless, 
were effectual ; they possessed a peculiarly troubling and dis- 
turbing quality ; and Herbert, whose own mind was already 
much too lucid for his comfort, felt that this timely, amused, 
malevolent, persuasive insistence upon the irony of things had 
contributed materially to his own private sense of disillusion- 
ment. 

Of his mother his memories were vague. He was only 
twelve years old when she died. And Mrs. Voysey had been 
a trifle weak on what we may call the domestic side : he had 
not seen very much of her. In the darkness of the days of 
her girlhood Miss Becher had passed for clever; and it was 
thought she showed her cleverness by marrying a man whom 
she could be said only to appreciate — as, possibly, she did 
show it, since of this man, even in the nearness of marriage, 
she kept her appreciation. Her nature, in a sense, was even 
more intellectual than her husband’s : she was without his 
social side. Her social instinct was sadly often at fault ; she 
made mistakes, and she made bad ones. People would take 
their revenge upon the doctor for his completeness, his unerr- 
ingness, by telling stories about his wife. She did not neglect 
her children, not being a person who did neglect things, but 
she failed to bring them, adequately, into her life. People 
used to laugh and say Dr. Voysey felt the humour of his wife 
— but this was not true. She met many of his more serious 
needs, and he was sincerely attached to her. When she died 
he missed her very much. 

As an illustration of his belief in the irony of things. Dr, 
Voysey might have quoted himself. He held that the forces 
in the individual temperament are incalculable, and had little 


VOYSEY 


39 


faith in any ultimate gain from the interference of personal 
influence. And yet his own personality was eminently pos- 
sessive. He took possession of his wife, and he took posses- 
sion of his son. Herbert revolted from time to time, as was 
only natural, for, as we have said, at bottom he was some- 
thing of an idealist — and Dr. Voysey was not : but his ap- 
preciation never sensibly diminished. And that was the 
misfortune of it, since appreciation, like other good qualities, 
brings a penalty for the least excess. For instance, it was 
gradually borne in upon Herbert as the years went by without 
bringing any definite achievement, that his father had suc- 
ceeded for them both. He saw he could never compete 
with him. He read the long list of qualities which mean 
success in a profession, and knew that he could not do at the 
Bar what his father had accomplished in Medicine. Some- 
how, he scarcely knew how, — most of his Oxford friends 
were ambitious, — he had lost the will to succeed. By a trait 
not uncommon with successful men. Dr. Voysey was not 
ambitious for his son: Herbert travelled, and read, and wrote 
a little, and made the most of the interesting people he knew, 
and Dr. Voysey took this life for him for granted. But 
Voysey himself did not take it for granted; he was not for 
nothing, no doubt, his father’s son, and not for nothing, one 
may venture to think, the son of a successful people. There 
was in him an instinct of activity that kept him restless; he 
must act, if he could not hope to accomplish. And, as a 
matter of fact, he was constantly filling up the intervals with 
all kinds of curious experiments. For one thing, he got up 
a period of history, and went extension lecturing in the prov- 
inces* He was a success. For some months he was absorbed 
in constitutional progress under early Plantagenets, and kept 
himself convinced of its importance. Women with pencils 
and note-books thronged his lectures, and wrote papers for 
him which he took great pains to correct. He had a pleasant 


40 


VOYSEY 


voice and a human manner, and he made the interest of his 
subject modern — or, at least, he tried to make it as modern 
as he could. But his sense of humour was too strong for 
him. A vision of the grave, gently-interested, largely-observ- 
ant faces looking up at him from amid the plentiful soft 
winter wraps, would appear before his eyes, and a perverse 
sense of incongruity would come over him, a sense of the 
distance between his subject and his audience which made 
the note-books look almost pathetic. And there was that 
side of him too which the feminine presence had a tendency 
to trouble ; or, if “ trouble ’’ be too strong a word for it, 
there was that in him, let us say, which, as he looked at the 
rows of upturned faces, gave him a sense of incongruity of 
another and a subtler kind. He gave up his lecturing, re- 
turned to town, and found that he had an experience the 
more to laugh over with the interesting people. 

The people were interesting and he laughed, being pleas- 
antly fond of laughter; and in the end the ways of his 
thought always brought him back to that : life was pro- 
foundly interesting. Profoundly interesting — and, he would 
add, profoundly sad. His sense of the comedy of things was 
keen, but his sense of the tragedy was more persistent. He 
would not have had his life over again — his boyhood had 
been too unhappy, but still he had had his share of amuse- 
ment, of pleasure, of friendship, of beauty, of the varied 
experience which gives life fulness and colour; and yet 
through it all he had kept an underlying consciousness that 
life was unutterably sad. He had only to let his fancy play 
among the memories and associations of this room to imagine 
what life might be at its worst ; but even at its best, it seemed 
to him, it needed an immense ignorance, or an immense self- 
ishness, to make it possible of acceptance. For himself, he 
knew that his craving for a something more, the something 
more that lay always at the back of the present satisfaction, 
had spoiled all but the finest moments he had known. 


PART II 


I 

The slightly forlorn look of committal which women, with 
whom railway journeys are infrequent, are apt sometimes to 
wear at the approach of them, deepened the expression of 
hostility in the elder lady’s rather formidable face. Dressed 
to the point at which little is needed beyond the tying of 
bonnet-strings and a last touch to a mantle, she was eating 
her luncheon with an excited sense of the value of minutes 
that sadly interfered with her appetite ; it was, it seemed, only 
the importance of gaining strength for her enterprise that kept 
her in her place at the table. The day was exceptionally 
warm, and though the room was in shade, and the shadow of 
the house pleasantly cut the sunlight on the grass of the green 
strip of garden, to which the open window of the room gave 
access, the impatient movements with which she put back her 
bonnet-strings when they got in her way showed the incon- 
venience even of their light addition. The whole expanse of 
her abundant person expressed hostility, with, beneath it, the 
working of an irritable self-pity, as if she were a woman who 
felt uncertain of her power to give sufficient effect to her 
intentions. 

In happy contrast to her, at the other end of the table, on 
which in the flowers and the cool invitation of a salad there 
seemed to be some recognition of the influences of the tem- 
perature, sat her daughter, in whose face, though a show of 
sympathy was not wanting, a perception of the contrast was 
written. Mrs. Detmond (our scene is the dining-room of the 

41 


42 


VOYSEY 


little Bedford Park villa) was quite free from any suggestion 
or hurry : indeed Mrs. Detmond looked admirably cool ; her 
observation of her mother might not be humorous, but at least 
it had brightened her face ; her person that, though mature, 
had nothing of the redundant development of Mrs. Boulger’s, 
revealed a subdued alertness. The shady room was hers, and 
it was almost as if, as she watched her mother, the touch of 
forlornness in the prospect of her temporary committal to the 
world, gave to the consciousness of possession a new flavour. 
The only movement to criticism that seemed to stir actively 
within her was one provoked by the good lady’s bonnet, whose 
shape too manifestly betrayed a country origin, and whose 
strings were at least superfluous. It was the bonnet in which 
Mrs. Boulger had arrived a week before, but as, during her 
visit, she had had the discretion to wear another, her daughter 
had wanted an opportunity for comment. The present occa- 
sion seemed favourable for the utterance of her suppressed 
objection. 

“ Strings,” she said, as she watched her mother put back the 
ribbons once more over her ample bosom, strings like that 
are not worn much now-a-days.” 

“ Nor bonnets either, to judge by the things one sees in the 
shop-windows,” said Mrs. Boulger. “You might just as well 
go about bare-headed.” 

“Your other bonnet, the one you have been wearing, is 
very nice, I think.” 

Mrs. Boulger bristled for a moment — then subsided, recog- 
nizing that her daughter’s opportunities were happier in such 
matters than her own. 

“ I only put it on to travel in,” she said. 

“ 1 like your other,” Mrs. Detmond conceded. 

Mrs. Boulger was silent. She looked at the clock. 

“There is plenty of time,” her daughter assured her. “The 
outside porter has not been yet for your things.” 


VOYSEY 


43 


From the clock Mrs. Boulger, who had now finished her 
luncheon, let her eyes stray round the room as if she sought 
to fix a last impression. It seemed on the whole to appeal to 
her. The old substantial middle-class traditions had not been 
rejected, but the freshness of a young menage had relieved 
their extreme sobriety. The furniture was of a cheerful, inex- 
pensive, solid, light wood, of a design that suggested a recent 
purchase; the flowers on the table, and the easy access to the 
garden, lent the room an air of much pleasantness. Opposite 
the window stood a responsible-looking sideboard that main- 
tained the traditions very handsomely, while the few engrav- 
ings on the pale terra-cotta distemper of the walls contributed 
to the effect of the furniture : the one over the fire-place gave 
the meeting of Wellington and Blucher; another, on the oppo- 
site wall, Dore’s Pilate’s Wife’s Dream. On the chimney- 
piece lay an open box of cigarettes, and, on a small table by 
the arm-chair, a box of cigars and a novel : the room generally, 
in its ease and its vague hint at serious dining, proclaimed a 
masculine occupation. At all events, the box of cigars, when 
it caught Mrs. Boulger’s eye, recalled her to the thought of 
her daughter’s husband. 

“You must say good-bye to Arthur for me,” she said. “ He 
rushed off this morning before I had time to say good-bye to 
him.” 

“ Arthur has to be at the office at half-past ten,” his wife 
explained. 

“ I suppose so : — but he was in a great hurry.” 

Mrs. Boulger rose from her chair; she moved to the side- 
board, and tied the strings of her bonnet with the help of the 
looking-glass it provided. Her warm face was given back to 
her amid a vague reflection of the shadowy and sunlit garden 
outside. 

“I think,” she said, when she had returned to her place, “I 
should change the blinds in your room if I were you. They 


44 


VOYSEY 


are much too dark. They don’t go with the curtains. I spoko 
to Ellen just now, and she said you had some lighter blinds 
which matched the curtains very well.” 

Her daughter looked up. She was clearly interested. “You 
spoke to Ellen ? ” she asked. 

“Yes, when she was helping me to pack.” 

“ Ellen ” Mrs. Detmond, however, restrained the 

impulse, that had given a touch of colour to her cheek, and 
said, “ I changed the blinds on Arthur’s account. He can’t 
sleep in the morning if the light comes into his eyes.” 

“ He would soon get used to it. It is only a fad. I told 
Ellen to get the blinds out for you to look at. I said I 
expected you would have them changed.” 

The colour in Mrs. Detmond’s cheek deepened. “ It was 
hardly necessary,” she said. 

“The look of your room is quite spoilt by those dark things,” 
Mrs. Boulger concluded. 

She had taken her gloves from the bag, which she had 
brought from the sideboard with her, and was turning them 
right side out. She began to put them on. Her daughter 
was still looking at her. She knew well enough that her 
mother had no objection to being irritating, but for the moment 
she was uncertain whether she realized how acutely irritating 
she could really be. She waited to hear what she would next 
have to say. What Mrs. Boulger next said showed that her 
thought had at least travelled from the blinds. “ I think you 
had better come to us this summer,” she observed. 

“ Arthur prefers the sea.” 

“You have been to the sea every year since you married. 
It would be a saving to come to us for once.” 

“ I think we can afford the sea. Arthur says they have been 
doing very well lately.” 

“ In spite of the times ? ” 

“The times don’t seem to affect them much.” 


VOYSEY 


45 


“ Arthur is very fortunate. I should have thought you 
would have been glad to come into the country. It is a long 
time since you saw your father. The country would be quite 
as good for baby as the sea.” 

Mrs. Detmond, who had also finished her luncheon, was 
playing with a fork. She looked up. “ Papa might join us 
at the sea.” 

The look of hostility on Mrs. Boulger’s face responded to 
this suggestion. “ It would scarcely suit your father,” she 
said. 

“You could do without him for a month.” 

The eyes of the two women met : for the first time Mrs. 
Boulger seemed to realize her daughter’s coolness and fresh- 
ness, and to feel the perceptible advantage it gave her. 

“ I can do well enough ! It would make no difference to 
me. I was thinking of him — of your father. But ... it 
is not worth talking about. The sensible thing is for you to 
come to us.” 

“Arthur prefers the sea. He likes to be where he can 
wear flannels, and do as he pleases.” 

Mrs. Boulger grew appreciably warmer. “ Men love to 
make guys of themselves,” she said. 

“Women are just as bad — or worse, for they make guys 
of themselves everywhere.” 

Mrs. Boulger declined to meet such reasoning as this. She 
buttoned her gloves. “ Well,” she said, again looking at the 
clock, “ I am sure I am very thankful things have turned out 
so well for you. It will be a great happiness to your father. 
Every one will be glad to hear it. It only proves what I have 
always said : the happiest marriages are seldom those which 
begin with the most ardent affection.” 

Mrs. Detmond rose from the table. “ I think it is time to 
get ready,” she said. 

Mrs. Boulger rose too. The allusion to the journey changed 


46 


VOYSEY 


her thoughts with a rapidity curious to notice : Mrs. Det- 
mond’s thoughts appeared to be less easily changed. Mrs. 
Boulger went to the sideboard, and made further use of the 
looking-glass. “Just tell me whether I am all right behind,” 
she asked. 

Her daughter administered a few straightening touches : — 
she had not spoken again when Ellen came into the room, and 
announced the arrival of the outside porter. 

Mrs. Boulger at once hurried out to him. He stood to her 
for the first of the afternoon’s long series of contentions. 

The leave-taking was friendly enough. Mrs. Boulger kissed 
her daughter, and her daughter returned the kiss. The small 
difference there had been between them belonged too much to 
the ordinary routine of their relations to disturb the established 
formalities of a parting. 

A few yards of garden lay before the house — just about as 
many as lay before the dining-room window at the back of it 
— and a strip of red tiles made a path between the porch pro- 
tecting the peacock-blue door and the wooden gate in the 
wooden palings. Mrs. Boulger passed over the red tiles, and 
looked back, as she opened the gate, to nod a last good-bye. 
When she had closed the gate and crossed the road, Mrs. 
Detmond went to the drawing-room (it was in the front of the 
house) to follow her further progress from the window. 

Across the roadway planted with small plane-trees at intervals 
on both sides, enclosed from it by a line of horizontal railing 
resting on white posts, lay a triangular stretch of public green, 
provided here and there, near the railings, with garden-seats, 
and crossed in several directions by asphalt paths. The Green 
was bounded by the high embankment of the railway, by 
which, for the houses facing the Green, the view was closed 
with disagreeable abruptness ; gorse and broom and other wild 
things grew upon the grassy slope, above which the signal- 
posts, and the sagging wires of the telegraph, iridescent in the 


VOYSEY 


47 


sunlight, lined themselves against the sky. The broad end 
of the Green, the base of the triangle, was the end in the 
neighbourhood of the station, a pale, coffee-coloured wooden 
structure, perched, with a signal-box of the same colour, at 
the height of the embankment, on wooden piles. Except for 
a few small children quarrelling near a seat, the Green was 
deserted, and Mrs. Boulger’s figure, moving slowly across the 
unshaded sunlight, had a perceptibly forsaken look. She had 
almost reached the end of the asphalt path she was following, 
when Ellen came into the drawing-room, and called Mrs. 
Detmond from the window. 

“ I have just found this in Mrs. Boulger’s room,” she said, 
showing a smelling-bottle. “Should I run after her with 
it ? ” 

Mrs. Detmond rejected the suggestion. 

“ No,” she said, “ it doesn’t matter.” 

The girl looked uncertain. “ I expect I could overtake her 
before ” 

“ No,” repeated Mrs. Detmond, decisively, “ it doesn’t 
matter. Leave it on the table.” 

The girl put the smelling-bottle on a small table near which 
she was standing, and added, doubtfully, “ I have got out the 
blinds Mrs. Boulger spoke about. They are in the nursery 
when you wish to see them.” 

“ I don’t wish to see them. Put them away again at once,” 
said Mrs. Detmond, impetuously — impetuously enough some- 
what to surprise the girl. 

When the servant had left the room, Mrs. Detmond re- 
turned to the window. Her mother was no longer in sight. 
The empty green, as it lay in the sunlight, with its straight 
asphalt paths and worn patches, had the look of exposure, of 
commonness, of hanalite^ that belongs to most public places. 
The small children, quarrelling by the seat, seemed to have 
a peculiar claim to it, and a train, passing along the embank- 


48 


VOYSEY 


ment, with the clank of its metal and the staring figures painted 
on the compartment doors, accentuated the pervading impres- 
sion of publicity. The spirit of the place was suburban ; the 
near presence of the city haunted the spot and explained it. 
The young woman turned from the window, and whether 
these impressions had unconsciously given a last touch to her 
emotions or not, tears had come into her eyes. 

For some minutes her emotions controlled her. The ad- 
mirable coolness, the comfortable indifference, that had made 
her rather more than a match for her mother, had yielded to 
demands belonging to another side of her nature. And, it 
was tolerably clear, these demands were not very simple. The 
even balance and general harmony of her being, expressed in 
her person and manner, were, it might be suspected, apt to be 
disturbed by occasional, unforeseen yieldings to impulse. She 
stood for a little while leaning against the chimney-piece, above 
the decorated grate, her pocket-handkerchief pressed to her 
eyes. Then gradually the wave expended itself, the emotions 
subsided, and her thoughts turned in the direction of her 
ordinary unexacting interests. 

One of the first of these interests was the room. She looked 
at it with that deeper sense of possession the departure of her 
mother had given her. Mrs. Boulger had permitted herself an 
unlimited indulgence in observation during her visit ; and by 
her mere presence had revived old claims from the past, which, 
vigorously as her daughter had resisted them, had made her 
feel less responsible. The house was once more hers *, the 
room was hers ; she was free again from that vague claim to 
ultimate control her mother had appeared constantly to be 
asserting. And yet — the excitement may have produced a 
reaction — the room looked curiously empty, its familiarity 
looked almost depressing ; in an elusive kind of way it repeated 
the suggestion of the empty Green outside, and as the haunting 
presence of the city gave the Green a pervading impression of 


VOYSEY 


49 


unrest, the pretty luxuries of the room seemed, to the young 
woman’s imagination, to call for a more vivid enjoyment. 

Absently, listlessly, as a matter of habit, she roamed among 
her possessions, passing from one to another with the slow 
assurance of movement that belonged to her, lifting the flowers 
in the vases, turning a photograph to the right angle to match 
its fellow, dealing more vigorously with a chair left in an 
aimless situation. On the whole, the room had a graceful, 
easy, occupied look, in spite of a certain air of inexpensiveness ; 
it was a room of small ingenuities, of rather cheap imitations. 
The window was mullioned, and its casements had small leaded 
diamond panes ; little old-gold curtains of some light material 
were looped and disposed across it ; on the sill, inside, an 
open Japanese fan stood between two Japanese vases. The 
art of Japan — or the art of the Japanese shop — in one form 
or another was conspicuous. There were more vases on the 
chimney-piece; a little table, used for afternoon tea, had a 
distant flavour of the east; a bamboo stand, which held flower- 
pots at irregular elevations, had come from the same emporium 
as the table. The pictures on the wall were chromos. 
Flowers, on the other hand, gave the room freshness and 
colour; the piano, its back decently draped with cretonne, 
stood boldly out from the wall, and shut in a picturesque corner 
beyond it ; between the fire-place and the window was a low 
sofa heaped with immense cushions, and behind the sofa a 
spreading palm. A cabinet of dark wood, a cabinet handsome 
enough to raise the note of its surroundings, stood against the 
wall by the door. Though that side of the house felt the sun- 
light, the room was almost in shadow, for a chestnut-tree in the 
next garden caught the sun’s rays and held them, and the pro- 
truding diamond-paned window, in spite of its length, was low. 

Mrs. Detmond’s touch, as she passed from one pretty thing 
to another lingered in a way that was almost affectionate ; the 
room was an exact expression of herself, of her tastes, of her 

E 


50 


VOYSEY 


aspirations, of the limits of her point of view. The thought 
of its contrast to the dreary regularity of her mother’s drawing- 
room at home gave her perpetual satisfaction ; the modernness 
of the window, the arrangement of the piano (her mother’s still 
kept the wall), the voluptuous sofa (there was nothing of the 
kind at Heckingden) with the romantic droop of the palm 
behind it, conveyed an impression of luxury that had a vivid 
appeal for her senses. She had had her ideals like the rest, 
and to own such a room as this was one of the things she 
had hoped from the future. But even the most ingenious 
arrangements, by themselves, are apt to be a little unrespon- 
sive, and it was not this afternoon for the first time that she 
was penetrated by a sense of something missing. There were 
moments when the room looked like a scene which was some- 
how waiting for the actors. 

Presently, when she came to the piano, she picked up a 
white wooden frame in which was the photograph of the only 
other actor who, at present, had played a part of importance 
upon her stage. Arthur Detmond’s classic features lent them- 
selves to the definite effects of the photographer, and but for 
the unconscious humour of his expression, his admirable head 
would have possessed dignity. His wife had no sense of 
humour, but she soon put down his photograph. She moved 
to a small table, and took up her work-basket, and seated her- 
self in her own corner of the sofa. 

The summer afternoon wore away, superb in its brilliance 
and slumberous in its invitation to repose, wore away slowly, 
uneventfully, an emblem of nature in her leisurely moods. 
Little by little the sunlight grew less insistent, and in all pos- 
sible places by the Green there was a persuasive lengthening of 
the shadows; they fell from the young trees and bushes on the 
embankment, from the plane-trees lining the roadway, in the 
strip of garden before the house the shadow of the chestnut 
covered the grass so that only one patch of sunlight was left. 


VOYSEY 


51 


a little patch on the red-tiled path near the gate. The air was 
full of familiar sounds; a suffused monotonous murmur, thrown 
up by the ocean of streets, keeping up an accompaniment to 
all the others ; the noise of the changing signals marked the 
passing of the trains almost as much as the grinding clank of 
their metal ; the quiet of the road yielded from time to time 
to the rattle of a tradesman’s cart, the roll of a doctor’s carriage, 
the crisp trot of a hansom. From her seat on the sofa Emily 
could not see the pavement, but the sound of the footsteps on 
the asphalt as they passed evoked some familiar figures. And 
she listened to these familiar sounds, and saw the familiar 
figures they evoked, with a soothed indifferent acceptance of 
them as among the ordinary conditions of life. Her life had 
never been very vivid, and the kind of emotion she desired 
was a kind not inconsistent with a good deal of quiet resting 
in the intervals. Her accusation of the hours was not for 
their passing monotony, but for the lack of ultimate satisfac- 
tion they brought her. 

The afternoon wore away, and she filled it with her work, 
with a novel, with a visit to the nursery where the baby was 
awake from his afternoon sleep, and she enjoyed the amuse- 
ment of seeing him at tea. The child danced with pleasure 
at the sight of her, and she took him on her lap, and fondled 
and fed and humoured him with a tender abandonment, a quick 
response to his diminutive needs. The room was pleasant and 
open; coloured Christmas pictures from illustrated papers were 
pinned to the walls ; a high fender stood before the grate ; 
something in the maid’s face suggested that she had been 
chosen for other qualities than her ability to look well in a 
white dress. When the child had finished his tea — his mother 
took hers with him — she helped the nurse to make the small 
preparations for his going out, and saw him disposed to advan- 
tage in a gay perambulator of a conspicuously modern and 
effective type, and preceded the nurse, in her white dress and 


52 


VOYSEY 


little black bonnet, down the red-tiled path to open the gate. 
Then, the late afternoon being pleasantly cool, she dressed in 
her turn, and went out to do a little shopping, to pay a bill or 
two, to change her books at the library. When she returned 
an hour or so later, she found her husband sitting in the 
drawing-room. 


II 


In Arthur’s face, the colour of which was a shade or two 
warmer than usual, there shone the mild radiance which comes 
from the consciousness of a well-spent day, and the hope of 
reward in an evening to be given to the consolation of dinner. 
His attitude, which was relaxed, expressed fatigue ; he was 
sitting in a corner of the sofa, his legs extended before him, 
his hands at the back of his head ; the exertions of the day 
had affected his person, they showed in the dulness of his 
boots, in the excessive looseness and want of fine adjustment 
in his serviceable coat, in a perceptible want of freshness in 
his wristbands ; but neither the warmth and dust of his office, 
nor the poor pretence of his luncheon, nor even the fatigues 
of the higher arithmetic, had been able to triumph over his 
humorous spirit. His smile had kept its absurd good-nature. 
When his wife came near the sofa, he drew her towards him 
and affectionately kissed her cheek — a caress Emily took too 
much for granted to return. 

“ So I suppose your mother has gone ? ” he said. 

“ She left after lunch as she intended.” 

“ Ah, I am sorry I couldn’t see her off. I couldn’t get 
away. I had an appointment with a man who had come up 
from Liverpool to see us, and I couldn’t cut him short.” 

“ I don’t think it mattered much.” 

‘‘ Your mother’s an old hand at travelling, eh ? ” 

Emily had drawn off her gloves, and had left them, with 
the novels she had brought from the library, on a table 
placed near the piano ; standing before the looking-glass over 

53 


54 


VOYSEY 


the chimney-piece, she pulled out the long pin which secured her 
light gay-ribboned straw hat, and gave her hair a few tidying 
touches. Her husband, from his seat on the sofa, under the 
palm which spread a trifle ironically above him, watched her, 
with an observation that was not too discriminating, but did 
legitimate justice to the grace of her matronly curves. He 
moved a little as if he expected her to sit beside him on 
the sofa, but she seated herself in a chair near the books. 
“ She makes a fuss,” she said, “ but she seems to get on all 
right.” 

Arthur laughed. His good-nature seldom questioned other 
people’s efficiency. “You miss her, I expect?” he suggested. 

Mrs. Detmond made no answer. She had taken one of 
the novels on her lap, and was glancing casually through the 
opening pages. 

Arthur took out his watch. “Your mother must be nearly 
home by this time,” he said. 

“ Yes.” 

“When does her train reach Heckingden ? ” 

“I don’t remember.” 

“ It takes about three hours, I think.” 

“ Yes, about that.” 

“And then there’s the drive.” He looked about him. “I 
suppose the Bradshaw’s in the dining-room ? ” he inquired. 

“ It was on the sideboard when I last saw it.” 

He pulled himself up from the sofa. Any question of 
trains, his own or other people’s, had a real interest for him ; 
he was interested, in many directions, in the conveniences of 
civilization. His desire for miscellaneous information made 
him a man very difficult to bore. He was on his way to the 
dining-room, when his wife’s novel caught his eye. 

“ Got another book ? ” he asked. 

She gave him the title and the author’s name. 

“ I thought you had had that,” he said. 


VOYSEY 


55 


She turned over a few pages indifferently. “ No, the girl 
said it was only just out.” 

“ I suppose you have read something of his before ? There 
must be precious few of ’em you have not read.” 

“ Not that I know of. I took it because it was clean, and 
they had got nothing else.” 

The reason seemed to him good. But the subject not 
lending itself to further comment, he added, ‘‘ Well, I’ll just 
see if the Bradshaw is in the dining-room. I think your 
mother must be home by now. I believe her train gets to 
Heckingden at 6.13.” 

Emily looked up from the novel. “ Isn’t it time to get 
ready for dinner ” she asked. 

The suggestion arrested him. “ I suppose it is getting on 
that way,” he admitted, and he again took out his watch. 
“ Yes, it is about time to get ready, I think. Are you com- 
ing ? ” he added, with a look that conveyed a hint at a desire 
for her company. 

“ In a minute or two. I must first go to the nursery. I 
want to speak to Sarah.” 

“ Ah, I’ll have a look at the young gentleman, too. I ex- 
pect he is asleep by this time.” And he forthwith strolled 
from the room, his solid trustworthy figure expressive of the 
rich contentment within him. 

It was a contentment that was not diminished by his 
dinner. No one who had seen him sitting at the head of his 
table — the pretty table with the flowers and the small shaded 
lamp — the largely respectable sideboard behind, and his good- 
looking young wife in front of him, could have missed a sense 
that the situation had a great fitness in it. As the drawing- 
room was an expression of his wife, of the point of view she 
had reached, of her habitual outlook, the dining-room might 
be considered an expression of him, taken on the domestic side. 
Its solidity, its comfort, its pleasantness, its freedom from all 


56 


VOYSEY 


vain pursuit of novelty, made it just the right setting for a 
man whose person and attitude, and (if one may say so) whose 
handling of the joint before him, expressed very finely an 
acceptance of normal conditions. There was about him a 
suggestion of rich fulfilment. He looked like a man who had 
attained the goal which all his antecedents had indicated. At 
all events, beyond all question, those antecedents had been 
perfectly normal. In truth, his early manhood had been so 
free from waywardness, had shown a goodness of heart so 
sound, and mental attainments so near the average, that his 
mother, who was the widow of an officer in the army and 
lived at Norwood, had seen his future in the Church. An 
uncle, however, had intervened; a stool in an office was 
offered him that carried with it a promise of the handsomest 
prospects ; and having taken a degree without too much 
effort, he had passed from Oxford to the City, where he had 
learnt to subscribe his faith in the importance of cheques 
pretty much as, had his mother’s idea been carried out, he 
would have subscribed the importance of creeds. This ability 
of his to feel the importance of things made a happy trait 
in his character. He had always felt their importance. The 
same assenting spirit in which he had done his fagging as a 
small boy, the same reverence he had felt for all the institu- 
tions of his school and college, were with him still, and he 
talked of a Conservative majority, or the defeat of a proposed 
innovation in the City, just as he had talked of the success of 
his school in a cricket match. An absence of all sense of 
the irony of things kept him astonishingly young. He was a 

man who had always had a great many friends among men 

or perhaps one should say a great many acquaintances ; he 
knew the kind of man to like him because he had just the 
right way of looking at things, possessed a feeling for the 
proper time for small indulgences, for lighting a pipe or pro- 
posing a glass, was very susceptible of humour, and, though 


VOYSEY 


57 


he seldom told stories himself, could be trusted with confi- 
dence never to miss the point of a story. His own sallies 
were usually harmless, but he would laugh at other men's 
sallies even when their humour needed a little privacy for 
its enjoyment. 

‘‘ This is a very good bit of lamb,” he was saying. “ Let 
me send you a little more. Ah, that's right. I gave you a 
very small piece. Let me see, I think I will send you this 
little bone,'' he added, judicially, leaning forward and examin- 
ing the joint with discerning care, the natural geniality of his 
expression not diminished by his momentary sense of responsi- 
bility. ‘‘ There, I think you will like that. Our man has 
treated us better since I spoke to him. There is nothing like 
putting one's foot down occasionally.'' 

“ It doesn't do to take just what they choose to send 
one.'' 

“ No ; tradespeople want a lot of looking after. Our man 
was getting into very bad ways.'' 

The conversation remained for some time in the neighbour- 
hood of the joint upon the table, its excellence provoking Arthur 
to revive for purposes of comparison many old recollections 
from the past. He had in this matter a singular memory for 
times and places ; he could tell you when he had enjoyed a cut 
of beef of exceptional quality, and where he had met with a 
disappointment. A success or a failure of a conspicuous kind 
gave him a lasting impression. His wife listened to him not 
intolerantly, for she had been used to hearing such things 
talked about all her life — she expected a man to talk about 
them ; but it seemed probable that she was thinking of some- 
thing else. What that something else may have been she 
possibly revealed by referring to a visit Arthur had paid that 
afternoon, about which he had told her up-stairs. “Did 
Mr. Voysey say when he would call ? '' she asked. 

“ Oh, didn't I tell you He said he would come on Sun- 


58 


VOYSEY 


day. It is the only day he has free. He is a very gay man. 
He is over head and ears in engagements.’" 

‘‘ He goes into society a great deal ? ” 

« He seems to be in the thick of it. He is the son of 
Dr. Voysey — you remember? The Dr. Voysey who died 
two or three years ago. We had him down to see my poor 
mother just before she died. I didn’t know it.” 

“ Did you never hear it at Oxford ? ” 

“No. Well, you see, I never knew him so very well. 
We were never intimate, exactly. We used to meet at an- 
other man’s rooms. ... It was funny, his being introduced 
to you like that at the Harringtons’. He had no idea he had 
met you until I told him.” 

“ He had not caught my name ? ” 

“ No.” 

“ Did you tell him who I was ? ” 

“ How do you mean ? ” 

“ Did you tell him which I was of the people he was intro- 
duced to ? ” 

“Ah, I see. Well,” he laughed, “I am afraid I didn’t tell 
him. It would have been a rather difficult business.” 

She paused a moment. 

“ He might have remembered what I had on.” 

“Yes — I don’t much think he would. I believe he had 
forgotten all about it. It is a fortnight since we were there.” 
But as soon as he had said it, Detmond had a vague feeling 
that it would have been better perhaps not to have betrayed 
Voysey’s fault of memory. The little pause that followed 
seemed rather to suggest that it might have been better. 

The room, in spite of the somewhat trying circumstance of 
dinner, had kept a good deal of its freshness. The window 
into the small garden was open still, and the evening air came 
freely in, touched with a pleasant coolness, and, with it, a 
murmur of summer evening sounds. The lamp was scarcely 


VOYSEY 


59 


needed, for without, above the houses opposite, the blue of the 
sky was light and clear, and even in the room — it was natu- 
rally dark — there was only the first gathering of the shadows : 
but Arthur was a man who liked plenty of light when he was 
busy. The expression of his wife’s face was not easy to 
catch ; the lamp on the table was shaded, and she was sitting 
with her back to the window ; in her manner there were 
movements of unusual animation. 

‘‘ There were a good many people, you say, at Mr. Voysey’s 
this afternoon ? ” she inquired. 

“ I found a kind of small At Home going on. I felt out 
of it. They were an elaborate lot of people, and I wasn’t 
exactly dressed for that sort of thing. I expected to see 
Voysey by himself.” 

It seemed for the moment as if Mrs. Detmond saw again 
the relaxed figure on the sofa, and had a vision of what the 
situation must have been. 

“ Were the people nice ? ” she asked. 

“ I don’t know that they were altogether my sort,” he said. 
‘‘ Oh, I suppose they were nice enough. They were talking 
about some French plays that are coming on in London. 
There was a lady who had just seen one of them in Paris, 
and was telling them about it. They seemed to be keen on 
Paris. And there was some one who knew Dyott, who has 
been climbing mountains in South America — there is an 
interview with him in to-night’s Blackfriars — and they talked 
about him. They seemed to know a good many well-known 
people. I was introduced to the daughter of the lady who 
had seen the French play. I told her I had only been in 
Paris once in my life ; spent a week there in August, and 
found it so beastly hot and dear — not to mention other 
inconveniences — that I had about as much of it as I could 
stand. She laughed and asked me if I preferred the sea. I 
told her I did decidedly, and we talked about sailing — she 


6o 


VOYSEY 


was yachting last summer, she said. She was a girl with a 
lot of fun in her, and we got to be very good friends.” 

Did you speak to Miss Voysey ? ” 

“Just a few words. She was talking to a man — I think 
the girl I was introduced to said he wrote — about something 
deep or other, modern culture or something. He seemed to 
be a good deal amused. Yes,” he reflected, summing up his 
impressions, “ they were a clever set of people. If I go there 
again, Fll put on a better coat.” 

The conversation for some little time continued to play 
round Voysey, his probable worldly circumstances, the life he 
seemed to lead, until, with the gathering of the shadows, the 
dinner passed on to dessert, and Arthur lighted his first 
cigarette. 

“ Certainly, Voysey is a lucky man,” he said. “ He must 
have a good income to live in a house like that : it is a big 
house. And I suppose he has all the society he wants.” He 
paused. His expression unexpectedly became less genial. It 
was as if he had reached a point in the consideration of Voy- 
sey’s case at which his thought made a slightly uncomfortable 
digression. “ I sometimes wonder whether we did right in 
coming here, you know — where we knew nobody,” he re- 
flected. “ I fancy we ought to have settled at Norwood. 
My mother knew a good many people at Norwood.” 

Emily was silent. She was playing with the lid of the 
cigarette-box. 

“ I am not sure really whether I want to know more peo- 
ple,” she said. 

The cloud on her husband’s geniality darkened. Her fail- 
ure to respond to what she must know was a cherished griev- 
ance of his evidently jarred upon him ; his tone unmistakably 
conveyed the suggestion that it jarred. “I always thought 
you did,” he declared. “I have had an idea you wanted 
more society.” 


VOYSEY 


6i 


“I used to think I did. But I am not sure whether I do.” 

He moved on his seat. The discovery of her change of 
view, of her withdrawal from his own position, was unpleasant 
to him, and the more unpleasant because he had made espe- 
cially sure of her acquiescence, if not of her positive sympathy. 
Such withdrawals were things that put him out. Precarious- 
ness of sentiment and opinion was a feminine trait of which 
he saw no need to be tolerant. ‘‘You surprise me,” he said. 

Emily was looking at the Turkish characters — if the 
strange legend were Turkish-: — on the reddish-brown lid of 
the cigarette-box. 

“ I thought we didn’t go to Norwood because you were 
afraid it would be too relaxing for you — that was what you 
said at the time.” 

To this he demurred. Norwood, it was his impression — 
and it had always been his impression — was not especially 
relaxing. Emily must have misunderstood his reason. 

His tone was becoming warm, and his wife was for letting 
the matter drop. “We do know a few people,” she said. 
“ There are the Atkinsons, and Mr. Holmes.” 

“ The Atkinsons live at Netting Hill. I was talking about 
knowing people down here.” 

She let the matter drop. Her fingers were still playing with 
the cigarette-box. Suddenly she opened the lid. 

“ I should like to try one,” she said. 

He laughed. “ Do. You have the box in your hand.” 

She took out a cigarette, and pretended to put it to her lips. 
“ Shall I ? ” 

“ If you are not afraid of being ill.” 

She put the cigarette to her lips. 

“ It doesn’t look nice,” he said. 

“ Give me a light, will you ? ” 

“ Put it down, Emmie. Don’t be silly.” 

She put out her hand for the matches. 


6z 


VOYSEY 


“ What nonsense ! Put it down.” 

“ Give me the matches.” 

He placed his hand on the box. “ Don’t be a goose, 
Emmie. Put it down. You wouldn’t like it.” 

“ I want to try. I believe plenty of women do smoke.” 

“ They don’t like it. They only do it because they want 
to kick over the traces.” 

She appeared to find the idea suggestive. She put the 
cigarette, however, on her plate, where it rolled into the juice 
of some preserved ginger, and then turned it over with her 
fork. 

“ There, you have destroyed a good cigarette,” he said. 
“ What a mess you are making ! ” 

“ I was very messy as a little girl.” 

“ I shouldn’t have thought it.” 

“ I was. It is odd how one changes. I was very untidy 
as a child.” 

She looked at him, and for a moment or two she continued 
to look. It was a look that made him uncomfortable ; he was 
baffled by it. He had a feeling at such times — he had come 
to know this look — that in some curious way she was escap- 
ing him, that things were passing within her to which he 
wanted the clue. It was a feeling that made him uncomfort- 
able while it lasted — but it did not last : his confidence v/as 
not to be shaken by anything so intangible as a look. 

“ I have always been different to other people,” she said. 
“ I have had very few friends, you know.” 

The admission was unwelcome to him : it suggested a small 
peculiarity, and to little admissions of peculiarity he found it 
difficult to respond. 

“ Among women, you mean ? ” 

“Yes, among women,” she said. 

He flicked the ash of his cigarette into a small tray with 
which he had provided himself. He had a vague feeling that 


VOYSEY 


63 


a woman should have friends among women ; but the feeling 
was vague, and a feeling he had that was not at all vague was 
that this was one of those things into which a man shouldn’t 
go too closely. 

Well,” he said, throwing his napkin on the table as he 
rose from his chair and began to straighten his waistcoat, 
it is getting rather close in here. Isn’t It ? ” For the fresh- 
ness of the room had yielded at last, and its air was slightly 
oppressive. 

“Let us take a turn in the garden, shall we? — if,” he 
added, looking out into the little strip where the green of the 
grass was deepening in the twilight, “ if one can call it a 
garden.” 

For a moment she seemed not to hear him. 

“ Come along, Emmie,” he said, with a note of insistence 
in his voice, as if he were a little tired of the waywardness 
of her passing mood. 

She folded her napkin and rose from her chair. “ I have 
let Sarah go out this evening,” she said ; “ I must go and see 
whether baby’s all right.” 

He smiled. He made no attempt to keep her. The inter- 
vention of his small son up-staIrs — and it was frequent — 
was not an incident that put him out. The allusion to the 
child had a pleasant sound in his ears. “ Very good,” he said, 
moving towards the window, “ come out when you’ve done 
in the nursery.” 


Ill 


When Voysey, about four o’clock on an oppressively warm 
Sunday afternoon, found himself crossing the unshaded Green 
from the station by one of the asphalt paths, his sense of the 
futility of his errand, of the large want of point in his being 
there, prevailed over his sense of humour. The warmth of 
the afternoon was excessive, and the warmth of a Sunday after- 
noon seems to possess a property of peculiar enervation. On 
such afternoons he usually endeavoured to avoid exertion, or, 
since exertion in a London June is not easy to avoid, at least 
to make it exertion of as agreeable a kind as he could. So 
that, as he followed the asphalt path and felt the untempered 
glare upon his back, he was conscious of a twofold grievance : 
he was committed to an expenditure of energy that lay outside 
his usual Sunday ways, and the end of his labours was not 
likely to be a reward of entertainment. There was an obvi- 
ous irrelevance in his acquaintance with Detmond, and it was 
not probable that to know his wife would give the acquaint- 
ance more point. 

Bedford Park was a neighbourhood of which he happened 
to have had some experience. Two or three years before, a 
friend of his, who was then leading a fitful literary existence, 
and whose wife, he remembered, had had a passion for pe- 
culiar greens, had lived in a small house with a red-tiled upper 
story and a picturesque gable, in a road in which all the houses 
were gabled and picturesque : his recollections of Bedford Park 
had been coloured by his acquaintance with these people ; they 
had always called it — as much, he imagined, from the look 

64 


VOYSEY 


65 


of the houses as from the pursuits of those who lived in them 
— they had always spoken of it as an artistic neighbourhood. 
This afternoon the poor sadly-frequent, sadly-abused epithet 
came back to him, and taken in relation to Detmond and his 
probable wife, it deepened his sense of incongruity. He would 
have expected so solid a man to live in a less fanciful suburb. 
A new interest quickened his observation ; he looked about 
him with a hope of new impressions. The Green, a small 
stretch of unrelieved sunlight under a sprinkling of white 
summer cloud, chanced to be but sparsely occupied: inter- 
mittent couples were strolling along the path under the 
embankment, a few more couples were sitting upon the seats 
by the railings near the road, he met a sober young woman 
coming from some afternoon class or a Sunday school, the 
lines of discipline still about her mouth, a mark book under 
her elbow. These were Sunday types with which he was not 
unfamiliar : types which might perhaps throw some light upon 
our native customs, but scarcely upon the manners of Bedford 
Park. For light upon these he felt he must wait until he had 
penetrated one of the small detached or semi-detached houses 
lying behind the trees in the roadway beyond the white posts 
and railings of the Green ; from a distance, as he saw them 
through the leaves, they gave him an effect of odd red angles 
and gables, of white window-frames, of smoke-darkened red 
roofs, which revived his previous impressions. 

The Detmonds’ house needed some seeking. For a few 
minutes he wandered fruitlessly over the asphalt pavement. 
When he had discovered the name on the wooden gate in the 
close wooden palings, the detached, ingeniously gabled, two- 
storied house proved to be so typical of his expectations that 
he instantly felt the humour of it. The British imagination, 
in domestic architecture, as in other things, has been much 
stirred of late ; the general revolt against the tyranny of exces- 
sive definiteness has found expression in tiles. And the Det- 

F 


66 


VOYSEY 


monds’ house illustrated the architectural aspect of this revolt 
very finely. The basement was of red brick ; the upper stories 
were faced with red tiles, and the topmost story possessed a 
white balcony, the frames of all the windows being also white ; 
the roof too was of red tiles, which the influences of smoke 
and the atmosphere had already somewhat darkened. The 
fancy of the architect had shown itself almost frolicsome in 
the ingenuity with which it had devised angles and gables, put 
windows in unexpected places, and achieved for the house 
that peculiar quaintness of modern effect, which, with a touch 
of the excess common to all protests, still, undeniably, has an 
element of the picturesque. Voysey noticed the small leaded 
diamond panes of the drawing-room window, and the old-gold 
curtains, draped by the mullions, that were disposed across it. 
He was amused by the strip of red tiles between the wooden 
palings and the odd little porch with the seat and the queer 
little window; and he was still more amused by the colour 
of the peacock-blue door. He felt that the intention of it 
all was excellent — and for such intentions he was able to 
feel sincerely grateful : it was only that he wondered how far 
the sobriety of middle-class traditions admitted of adjustment 
to so much variety, to so determined a demand for quaintness. 
Life, he had a feeling, was nothing like so quaint as all that ! 
He was conscious of a humorous discrepancy. 

The amusement of these small speculations had the effect 
of restoring his good-humour. It was in a larger and more 
genial spirit that he let his eye wander round the drawing-room, 
which, at the moment of his entering it, was unoccupied. His 
first impression was favourable. The long window, with the 
small diamond panes of the casements, one of which was open, 
and the little old-gold curtains daintily draped by the mullions, 
was good of its kind, and taken with the droop of the palm 
over the big cushions on the sofa, and the picturesque corner 
behind the piano, gave him an impression that was far from 


VOYSEY 


67 


being unfavourable ; but when his eye reached the details, 
when he saw the chromos on the wall, when he realized how 
large was the profusion of Japanese vases and Japanese fans, 
and of other small libels upon the taste of an original people, 
his interest fellj he had a discouraged sense of the cheapness 
of the small ingenuities. He was disappointed. It seemed 
sad that the promise of the exterior should amount to no more 
than this. 

He had taken up a novel that was lying on a small table by 
the piano, and was turning to the title-page, when Mrs. Det- 
mond came into the room. He put down the novel and 
stepped forward. Inconvenient as it is in most cases not to 
know one’s hostess, it may be still more uncomfortable to 
have forgotten her. To his relief, Voysey found, almost at 
the first glance, that he remembered Mrs. Detmond quite 
well. At all events he remembered her face and the general 
circumstances of their meeting : the impressions their con- 
versation had given him for the moment he could not recall, 
though any chance word, he fancied, might give him the clue 
to them. Mrs. Detmond seated herself in what he imagined 
was her own corner of the sofa, and, for himself, he accepted 
a rather uncomfortable little chair. 

For some minutes they talked of Mrs. Harrington’s party, 
of Voysey’s meeting with Arthur that night, of their acquaint- 
ance at college, and of other matters of a like unimportance. 
And as they talked, Voysey saw, little by little, that whatever 
his first impressions of Mrs. Detmond might have been, he 
was gaining a good many new ones. The strongest of these 
impressions were that Mrs. Detmond was a good-looking 
woman, that she was shy, that she was latently emotional. 
Her good looks he was not inclined to attribute to any marked 
beauty of feature, nor to any peculiar quality of expression. 
He attributed them to such homely merits as lay in the shape 
of her face, in the mould of her pale smooth cheek, in the 


68 


VOYSEY 


doing of her very pretty dark hair, and in the uncertain mean- 
ing of her eyes. They were eyes that helped him to no very 
definite inferences as to her disposition or its tendencies ; he 
merely felt that the obvious feminine virtues were not too 
conspicuous in them. The lower part of her face was heavy ; 
her mouth, which on the whole perhaps was a little too notice- 
able a feature, had the mobility wanting to the rest of her face : 
it would, he fancied, be the first feature to betray emotion. 
The gravity of her expression, he suspected, was chiefly the 
result of shyness — though it was tolerably evident that she 
suffered from a want of humour. Her taste in dress was 
much better than her taste in decoration. She wore a quiet 
shade between grey and blue, and her dress, though certainly 
it did contain a reference to the day, did not, too distressingly, 
recall it in its more uncomfortable formalism : there was about 
her a pleasant effect of coolness and lightness and ease as she 
sat reposefully among the cushions under the broad pointing 
leaves of the palm. And her attitude, somehow, seemed to 
explain the intention of her room. In spite of its want of 
distinction, of the absence of all judicious selection, the room 
suggested an intention of luxury, and Mrs. Detmond, as she 
sat among the cushions of her almost voluptuous sofa, vaguely 
confirmed the suggestion. There was nothing mesquin about 
her, nothing weak nor small, nothing calling for apology. 
There was not the least hint at self-effacement in her shyness. 
Her shyness was not of that kind. It was rather of the kind 
that is a confession of imperfect opportunity and a tribute to 
happier experience. He fancied he caught through the ex- 
cessive diffidence of her manner an appeal for time, for a 
second hearing, for a reservation of the critical judgment. 

« Certainly,” he was saying, “ parties like the Harringtons’ 
have this to be said for them : they give one an opportunity 
of meeting people.” 

“ I had never been to a party like that before.” 


VOYSEY 


69 


“ It amused you ? ” 

“ I liked watching the people.” 

“Yes, there is always that to fall back upon. One can 
always look on.” 

“ But you know a great many people ? ” 

“ Far too many,” he said. 

She hesitated a moment. “ If people amuse you so much, 
I don’t see why you should mind knowing them.” 

“Ah, we talked about this the other night!” he exclaimed, 
a gleam of memory suddenly enlightening him. 

“ About something of the sort, I suppose.” 

“ I hope my sentiments were not very shocking ? ” 

“You seemed to be rather fond of being alone.” 

“ I remember ! Your sentiments were much more sociable.” 

“ I don’t think one minds being alone very much,” she 
cautiously reasoned, “ provided one has something to look 
forward to when one won’t be alone.” 

“You like to have things happen ? ” 

The gravity of her expression yielded a little. “Yes, I 
think I do.” 

“ Then you must like London,” he proclaimed. “ London 
is so eminently a place where things happen.” 

“ No, I don’t like London at all. I am not used to it. I 
have always lived in the country.” 

“ You like the country ? ” 

“ I like it for some things. I like the country itself.” 

“ The fields and flowers and summer lanes and so on ? ” 

“ Yes, I like all that. But on the whole I would rather 
live in a town. It is more convenient.” 

“ The country is not convenient, I imagine.” 

“ No : it is a great nuisance to live a long way from shops.” 

“ You would like to live in a country town ? ” 

She deliberated a little. “Not in a small one. The people 
are so horrid.” 


70 


VOYSEY 


“ There are not enough of them.’^ 

“You can’t do anything,” she explained. 

“ If things do happen, they too soon become common 
property.” 

“Things never do happen.” 

“ Do things happen at Bedford Park ? ” 

She looked at him, and he almost fancied there was a 
transient gleam of humour in the look. “ Sometimes,” she 
said. 

“ I wonder what sort of things ? ” 

She was still looking at him, and her glance appeared to 
be gaining in confidence. “ One meets people sometimes.” 

“ And that may be the most important thing that can 
happen,” he declared. 

She smiled. 

“ When some people meet . . . ! ” he laughed. 

But changing his tone, he went on, “ I am a terrible cock- 
ney, I am afraid. I have never lived in the country. I have 
only stayed in it for a few weeks now and then with people I 
know. But I am surprised you don’t like London.” 

“ Why ? ” she asked, looking surprised herself. 

“ Because London is so endlessly amusing, and you have 
admitted you like being amused.” 

The colour mounted to her pale cheek. She smiled, and 
evidently this time it was with a good deal less embarrassment. 

“ I didn’t know I said I liked being amused.” 

“ What you have said comes to that.” 

“ There are different kinds of amusement, aren’t there ? ” 

“ London gives you all kinds.” 

She rearranged the big cushions behind her. The appear- 
ance of ease she had had from the first was ceasing to be an 
appearance. 

“ London is too big and noisy and dirty,” she insisted. “ I 
am not used to it. I hate the bother of having to catch trains 


VOYSEY 


7 


and omnibuses and things. It is always a rush, and I dislike 
being hurried. Of course I like the shops : it is very con- 
venient to be able to get what one wants so easily. But I 
don’t care for the other things. I have seen all the sights.” 

“ Madame Tussaud’s ? The Zoo? The Tower? The 
Monument ? Westminster Abbey ? ” 

‘‘Yes, I have seen all that.” 

Voysey laughed. “The British Museum?” 

“ Oh yes, horrid place ! ” 

“You must have worked hard at some time or other,” he 
said. “ But the British Museum is not quite the kind of 
amusement I was thinking of.” 

“You were thinking of theatres and concerts and things?” 

“Not altogether — I prefer the British Museum to some 
theatres. I was thinking especially of the people. London 
is the place for those who look on.^ 

She rested a moment. There was not very much shyness 
now in the way she looked at him. 

“ You don’t do anything,” she asked, “ do you ? ” 

“ I try to do a little here and there,” he demurred. “Does 
my leisure shock you ? ” 

“No : I don’t think things shock me much.” 

“ Good ! ” he exclaimed. “ I wonder what amuses you,” 
he added, whimsically. 

“ When one is married, I suppose one is not expected to 
think too much of amusement, is one ? ” she asked. 

“ Goodness knows what is expected from married people!” 
he declared. “I believe,” he hazarded, “you are very 
romantic I ” 

“ You are the first person who has ever said so.” 

“ So few people understand.” 

“ Understand women ? ” . 

“Oh, no, not women merely :/no one understands women 
— women themselves don’t. ’f 


72 


VOYSEY 


“ No, women don’t understand,” she murmured. 

‘‘Ah, I am right,” he laughed. “You are romantic, you 
know.” 

“ Don’t women understand romance, then ? ” 

“ Not always other women’s, I fancy.” 

At this point their conversation, in which Voysey was 
beginning to find some reward for his departure from his 
Sunday ways, was diverted by the appearance of Arthur’s 
genial face in the doorway. Arthur’s face was as genial as 
ever; the mere sight of Voysey seemed a provocation to his 
sociable spirit : but there was a transitory dimness over the 
usual radiance of his expression, and a slight want of alacrity 
in his movements as he sauntered among his wife’s trivial little 
chairs in search of one with a more robust promise of comfort, 
which suggested that he too was given to taking this afternoon 
easily. It appeared a pretty safe inference that he had but 
just quitted his slumbers. And an odour fell from his person 
that betrayed the atmosphere in which he had been seeking 
rest. Though it was probable he had changed his coat (the 
frock-coat he wore had the distinction of occasional usage), 
the fragrance of his cigar had followed him. 

“ I saw nothing of you, Voysey, the other afternoon,” he 
was saying. “ And I wanted to get hold of you for a bit to 
hear what you’re doing. But you were too busy. You seem 
to have got things very nice at your place,” he added. 

Voysey made a gesture of deprecation. 

“Uncommonly nice. I expect,” he laughed, “you have 
a pretty easy time on the whole.” 

“ Ask Mrs. Detmond,” Voysey said. 

Arthur looked at his wife, his face brightening at the turn 
their talk was taking, but Emily merely changed her position 
on the sofa. 

“ You told me Mr. Voysey didn’t do anything,” she said. 

“ Well, you don’t, do you, Voysey ? ” 


VOYSEY 


73 


“ Not what you would call anything in the City,” Voysey said. 

Mrs. Detmond looked at her husband. 

“ You expect so much from any one there,” he added. 

“ No, hang it all ! I don’t want a man to work if he is 
not obliged to. I wouldn’t go into the City every day if I 
could help it.” 

“ I thought you liked the City,” his wife put in. 

« Oh, I am not complaining, you know. One might do 
a great deal worse. At the end of the year one has something 
to show for it. And that will make anything pretty tolerable, 
I reckon.” 

“ Anything ! ” Voysey sighed. 

“ Oh, you’re all right,” Arthur declared. 

“ The reward of my labours is not substantial.” 

‘‘ They are not a very substantial sort of labours, I expect.” 

“ It is my best,” said Voysey, humbly. 

Arthur laughed. The little cloud that had obscured the 
radiance of his expression had passed away, and the geniality 
of his nature shown in undimmed fulness. 

“ The drawback to this kind of life, I find, is that one gets 
no fresh air,” he was objecting, a little later. “Of course, I 
have Saturday afternoon and Sunday. But I don’t know how 
it is, I never do much on Saturday. I suppose by the end of 
the week one gets a bit slack. I come down here after lunch, 
and generally potter about with my wife : go shopping or 
something. Then on Sunday — well, I dare say I ought to 
do more : but you know what Sunday is One goes to church 
in the morning: dines early ” 

“Takes it easy in the afternoon. ...” 

“Yes : or sometimes we go to Kew Gardens. If my wife 
goes to church in the evening, I get a stroll, but I don’t know 
that I get much fresh air. You see, that’s where it is : about 
here is not what I call fresh air. Of course it looks pretty 
open just near us,” he waved his hand in the direction of the 


74 


VOYSEY 


Green and the embankment. “ Looking down from the train, 
or coming across the Green from the station, you might think 
this was the beginning of the country. But the country doesn’t 
begin here, nor anything like it. The country is miles away. 
I mean anything worth calling country. The fact is there are 
poor, or at all events more or less poor, neighbourhoods nearly 
all round us. On the other side of the embankment there,” 
from his low seat Voysey could see the embankment, but not 
the Green, “ you have Chiswick and towards London,” he 
pointed in the direction of the station, “ Chiswick precious 
soon becomes Hammersmith. At the back of Bedford Park,” 
he looked towards the wall opposite the window, “ you have 
another open space, in the curve of a railway, but beyond 
that again lie Acton and South Acton, and a pretty dreary 
region that is, and South Acton brings you round to the 
embankment again,” he nodded towards the window. ‘‘ No, 
it is fresher here, I suppose, than you get it in London, but it 
is not what I call fresh air. Can’t be with miles of houses 
about. What do you do for exercise, Voysey ? You used to 
be a runner at Oxford. I remember seeing you win a hun- 
dred yards race once at your college sports. Do you do any- 
thing in that way now ? ” 

“ No : I have not run since I left college. I have given it 
all up.” 

‘‘ One does,” Arthur confessed. “ Not that I was ever a 
runner,” he laughed, “ I don’t believe I could have done a 
hundred yards in half a minute ! But one does get out of the 
way of things. It is rather a pity.” 

Voysey glanced at Mrs. Detmond, from whom the conversa- 
tion appeared to be drifting, to see whether these observations 
had any interest for her, whether she was disposed to endorse 
them. She was looking at that moment at a train which was 
passing on the embankment, and her expression gave no clue 
to her attitude. 


VOYSEY 


75 


“You should make your husband join the volunteers, Mrs. 
Detmond,” he said maliciously, and, as she turned to him, 
he saw she had caught the malice, and was so far from resent- 
ment, that he felt the guilt of having said it. 

“ Yes, it would be a very good thing for him,” she assented, 
keeping her eyes on Voysey. “It would give him something 
to do on Saturday.” 

The corners of her mouth quivered for a moment as she 
still looked at him, and it was a glance, Voysey felt, of the 
kind which tends to establish relations. It gave him a feeling 
of complicity. 

Ellen was arranging the wicker tea-table, that had, or might 
be supposed to have, a faint reminiscence of the East, near the 
sofa, within Mrs. Detmond's reach. When she had brought 
in the tea-tray, and having deposited the cake and bread-and- 
butter on the little protruding ledges of the table, was about to 
leave the room, Arthur checked her and said — 

“Wait a moment, Ellen. What do you drink, Voysey ? 
Do you drink tea ? Or will you have something a little 
stronger ? A little whiskey ? Try a whiskey-and-soda. Or a 
glass of claret — or claret-and-soda. Don’t drink tea if you’d 
rather have something else.” And, as Mrs. Detmond sup- 
ported her husband, Voysey yielded to the offer of the claret- 
and-soda. The servant left the room to fetch it. 

“You dine late on Sunday, I suppose, just as on any other 
day ? ” Arthur inquired. 

Voysey admitted that this was the custom with Miss Voysey 
and himself. 

“Ah, you can do it with an establishment like yours,” 
Arthur said, and a wistfulness in his manner revealed his 
sympathy with the people who could command this discretion. 

But great as was Arthur’s sympathy with material advan- 
tages of every kind, they clearly did not, in his estimate of 
existence, cover the whole range of human felicity. He pos- 


76 


VOYSEY 


sessed, as upon a brief acquaintance one expected him to pos- 
sess, a high sense of the domestic affections. The nurse by 
and by, in obedience probably to the Sunday custom, brought 
down the boy (a child of some eighteen months) from the 
nursery, and Arthur’s reception of him, as he took him from 
the girl and merrily put him on his own knee, showed the 
place he gave paternity in his list of blessings. Voysey looked 
on. In a world of divided aims, in a world of such disastrous 
deviations and discrepancies, it was pleasant to find a man who 
was so comfortably at one with himself. The simplicity of this 
solution of matters in which he himself found so much that 
was complex for the moment made him almost envious. He 
had a consciousness of the gain from taking life more simply. 
And he had a consciousness, too, that Arthur was before him 
in what, after all, was a very interesting human experience. 
But his view of these things was too complex, paternity looked 
to him still an experiment far too hazardous for his observation 
to be shaded with envy for anything more than a moment : 
his own aspirations were only very partially domestic. His 
good-nature, on the other hand, was a quality very much to 
his credit : he responded generously to the small child’s inter- 
est in the splendid wonder of his watch-chain, for which he 
abandoned the simpler pastime of an unused spoon. Voysey 
was passing on to the offer of his knee, when a sudden change 
of feeling, an unexpected loss of courage, sent little Arthur to 
his mother. 

“ He is not used to strangers,” she apologized. “ He has 
been much better with you than he is with most people.” 

Emily took the child on her lap and comforted him, and, 
even to Voysey ’s unpractised eye, there was experience as well 
as affection in her touch. It had been borne in upon him that 
from the random chances of their talk a fine thread of under- 
standing had been woven between Mrs. Detmond and him- 
self ; but he felt as he watched her caressing the child, she had 


VOYSEY 


77 


come very near to forgetting him. And he liked her better 
at that moment than he had liked her yet. The child was 
precious to her and she was good to him, and women some- 
times, in their attentions to their children in his presence, had 
left him with a different impression. 

But the child’s balance had been gravely disturbed, and even 
his mother’s touch failed entirely to restore it. So Arthur, out 
of compassion for their guest, and it might be perhaps for him- 
self, since paternity could hardly yet wholly have steeled his 
patience to a child’s crying, took the boy, and carried him to 
the nursery up-stairs. Voysey and Mrs. Detmond were alone. 
And Voysey at once had a sense of it. Her eyes met his as 
she turned to reach the teacup she had put down to receive 
the child, and the look in them appeared a kind of invitation. 

He got up and placed his empty tumbler upon the tea-tray. 
Emily, of course, asked him to refill it, but, thanking her, he 
declined, and used the occasion to select a rather more com- 
fortable chair. There was a moment’s silence. He was con- 
scious of the unwisdom of accepting that little invitation, and 
he was conscious too of the difficulty of not accepting it. 

“ I suspect I have discovered one of your amusements,” he 
said. 

She smiled. “ Baby ? ” 

“ Isn’t he your principal amusement ? ” 

“ I think you seem rather fond of making discoveries.” 

“Yes, it is one of my amusements,” he admitted. 

She quietly stirred her tea. “ I don’t think I understand 
you,” she said. 

“ You will. It is a mere question of time.” 

There was another pause, one that lasted a little longer than 
the other. “ I believe you think you understand people,” she 
observed. 

“ There, you see ! You are finding me out already ! ” 

“ I believe you do think so.” 


VOYSEY 


78 

I believe,” he said, looking at her whimsically, “ there are 
people who are not much used to being understood.” ^ 

She had just deposited her teacup upon the table. She 
leaned forward for a moment or two under the pretext of 
brushing the crumbs from her lap. Her cheek had taken a 
tinge of colour. Her shy discomfort, her attitude, the unac- 
customed colouring in her cheek, lent her prettiness the charm 
of a curious provocation. It seemed to him, if one may so put 
it, that she was a strong expression of her sex. There came 
from her an emanation of those troubling and penetrating 
feminine qualities against which his armour, as he knew, was 
not, and had never been, very strong. 

Suddenly she looked up. “You are very fond of London ? ” 
she asked. 

He was not sorry that their talk should be diverted. “ It 
is a dear romantic old place,” he said. 

“ I shouldn’t call London romantic.” 

“ Oh, perhaps, if you knew it better.” 

“ I call it an ugly monster of a place.” 

“ Ah, don’t abuse it,” he protested. “ Don’t abuse it. It 
is a monster, and it is such a wonderful, mysterious monster 
that it is not safe to abuse it. It may have its revenge upon 
you if you do.” 

She laughed a little. She looked up at him with a glance 
from which the last touch of shyness had vanished. 

“ Oh, I think I am pretty safe,” she assured him. 

He rose to go. 

“Ah, that’s just it,” he said moving towards her and putting 
out his hand, ‘j^it doesn’t do to make too sure, really — one 
never knows ! 


IV 


When Voysey, after an experience of some half-hour in 
the Underground, on his way back from Bedford Park, had 
left Portland Place and turned into Harley Street, the sober 
greyness of the houses welcomed him with a homelike sense 
of familiarity that struck the note of his feelings at the mo- 
ment. The houses on one side still held the sunlight from 
their topmost windows to their parapets, but beneath this 
warm band the grey fronts had the coldness of extinguished 
light, and the road below, except for spaces of sunshine where 
crossing streets let in the western glory, lay a dull length of 
shadow under the lightness of the evening sky. The mo- 
notonous perspective of grey fronts, relieved only by the 
varying elevations of the window-sills and the projection of 
occasional refacings, ended, towards Cavendish Square, in a 
misty indefiniteness of deepening shadow, and, on the other 
side, in the still sunlit greenness of the trees just visible in 
Regent’s Park. At one of the crossings a solitary hansom, 
standing full in the incoming light, broke the emptiness of 
the long line of roadway, white with its summer dust. Bells 
were ringing for evening service, a jangled discordance in 
their competing summons, and the hurrying of people, whose 
eager faces hinted at some human promise of relaxation lying 
in the prospect of their devotions, gave the pavements a 
momentary movement. 

Harley Street had long had an appeal for Voysey. In its 
unimaginativeness, its look of permanence, its suggestion of 
professional success, its immense respectability, it was typical 
of the region about it, of one aspect of London itself ; it had 

79 


8o 


VOYSEY 


the charm of all typical things, of all things that illustrate a 
phase of life, of definite human intention. The street seemed 
to mean so much ; so much in our intentions that was ex- 
cellent, with so much that was limited, was expressed by its 
sober reality ; and his private detachment from the rather 
ponderous ideals it represented enabled him to enjoy them, 
permitted him to get their full humour and interest. Indeed 
his liking for the street was possibly something of a reaction : 
his very detachment, the very waywardness of his own im- 
agination, may have inclined him to its prosaic conformity. 
At all events, the street this evening meant the more after 
the forced picturesqueness of Bedford Park which had seemed 
to him to mean so little. 

And Harley Street had other associations and suggestions : 
— associations woven very closely into the absurd, tragic 
memories of his childhood. That lurking sense of apprehen- 
sion, which in one grotesque form or another had made the 
terror of his childhood, and in its most grotesque form had 
given him the estranging dread of his father, the atmosphere 
of the street in which he had lived had served very sensibly 
to quicken : he could still recall the fascination with which, 
as a little fellow, he would read the names on the ominous 
brass plates upon the doors, when each name stood to him 
for an enemy in league with his father, for one possessed of 
the same terrible power to doom him by dreadful discoveries. 
He could still remember the vivid sense of escape which 
would come to him when he turned into Oxford Street and 
felt the full tide of life flowing in that spacious thoroughfare : 
how it had seemed to rescue his small spirit, to set it free, to 
bear it away on its flood ; this splendid rush of life was a de- 
fiance of, a triumph over, the demon of apprehension he had 
left behind. He could remember his odd little delight at see- 
ing so many people who looked so well, who looked so hap- 
pily removed from the likelihood of a visit to Harley Street; 


VOYSEY 


8i 


their look of secure indifference to its terrors had always 
appeared to strengthen his chances: — and he could remember 
how the sun would go in again when the time came to return 
to it. 

These were childish memories, childish things long put 
away like the toys and treasures in his nursery: and yet even 
now the street had not lost its old associations, but seemed to 
him one of the most pathetic, one of the very saddest, places 
of pilgrimage in the world — a place to which, as to some 
shrine, the heavily stricken brought their sufferings and their 
fears, and, in their extremity, sought from the modern priest 
of science the same miracle they had sought from saints of 
old. And, in spite of his little sense of proportion, which 
warned him how much there is in life that is better worth 
dwelling on than its cruelties, the pity of it haunted him still, 
still made a latent troubling element in his consciousness. 
Fond as he was of laughter and averse from all exaggeration, 
yet that there must always be something temporary and pro- 
visional in his enjoyment was a feeling that never quite quitted 
him. It was as if, somehow, one or other of the strands by 
which life binds most of us had, with him, got broken in the 
struggles of his childhood. 

Herbert and Miss Voysey dined alone that evening in the 
still rather sombre dining-room, beyond whose folding-doors 
behind the sideboard was the room in which Dr. Voysey had 
seen his patients, and which Herbert now used for a study. 
The table was lighted by four shaded candles, which left a 
wealth of pleasant shadow in the room, and allowed the pic- 
tures on the wall, one of which was a portrait of Voysey ’s 
mother painted soon after her marriage, to give no more than 
a general impression of solid subjects in obscure colours that 
produced a willingness to defer closer inspection. The furni- 
ture bore the date of other fashions and of other aims, and, 
in spite of relieving touches from the hands of Miss Voysey 

G 


82 


VOYSEY 


and Nell, the room still kept a certain solemnity : the imagi- 
nation found it easy to picture the scene in the days when, 
from ten to one every morning, patients had gathered and 
waited there, cheating, or trying to cheat, their anxiety with 
illustrated newspapers and the humour of old volumes of 
Punchy which it was Nelson’s care, before he cleared away 
the breakfast in another room, to dispose at proper intervals 
on the table. Nelson was serving the table in his correct, 
noiseless, vigilant way this evening, and it was as he was 
removing the soup that Miss Voysey inquired of Herbert — 

“ Well, did you have a successful visit to Bedford Park ? 
You found your ‘friends at home, I suppose ? ” 

“Yes, I renewed my acquaintance with Mrs. Detmond, 
and made the acquaintance of her baby.” 

“That suggests a young menage,” said Miss Voysey. 
“ Did you find Mrs. Detmond more interesting than you 
expected ? ” 

“ I think I did.” 

“ What is she like ? ” 

Herbert shrugged his shoulders. 

“ Like her husband, I expect.” 

“ Ah, more interesting than her husband. She is not quite 
so unmistakable.” 

“ I scarcely spoke to Mr. Detmond the afternoon he called. 
I thought he seemed a — a good sort of man.” 

“ That is pretty much what one would say of him.” 

“And his wife ” 

“ A good sort of woman ? My dear aunt, how can you 
ask such things ? ” 

The aunt smiled. “ As a rule, you make up your mind 
about people rather quickly, I think.” 

“ I have not made up my mind about Mrs. Detmond.” 

“ She must be interesting, then.” 

“ She is primitive.” 


VOYSEY 


83 


Surely that ought to have helped you ! ” 

“ It’s her being primitive that makes the difficulty. One 
is not used to primitiveness.” 

Miss Voysey looked up. 

“There is plenty of the old Eve still about, but most 
people have made such large additions to the old Eve that 
she has rather got out of sight.” It is the additions we have 
to judge people by — the additions we do see. And one 
begins now-a-days to know the additions. One doesn’t know 
the old Eve half so well.” 

“ And you saw the old Eve in Mrs. Detmond this after- 
noon ? ” 

“In the course of an afternoon call? Heaven forbid! 
She is not so primitive as that.” 

“Well, then, what did you see ? ” 

Voysey laughed. “ I don’t know. Oh, I saw one 
thing : she is a pretty woman.” 

Miss Voysey thought it over. “ I fancy,” she observed, 
rather shrewdly, “ you saw a good deal. At all events, you 
liked what you did see.” 

“ I think she liked me,” he declared, boldly. 

Miss Voysey felt this was not improbable. “ It was some- 
thing to see that,” she said. 

There was a pause. The return of Nelson diverted their 
talk for a moment. When the subject was resumed Voysey 
added, in a different tone, “ I find I am rather committed to 
the Detmonds. There was nothing, as I told you, in our 
acquaintance at college to justify the ardour with which he 
has insisted upon our renewing it : but since we have renewed 
it, and I have called upon them, I feel that he has a claim to 
some small return from me. I wonder whether you would 
mind calling upon Mrs. Detmond ? ” 

Miss Voysey hesitated a little. “Yes, if you wish it, I 
will call upon her,” she said. 


VOYSEY 


“ I think it would help to put me right with them if you 
would.” 

Miss Voysey was still reflecting. “ By being primitive,” 
she observed, “ you mean, I suppose, that Mrs. Detmond is 
suburban ? ” 

‘‘ Oh, no, not suburban. She comes from the country — 
though that’s nothing : half the people one meets come from 
the country. London is full of the country. Of course,” 
he went on, “I have been talking nonsense about her. You 
will find she is really just like other people. You know her 
quite well. You must have had scores of Mrs. Detmonds at 
Torquay.” 

But Miss Voysey’s imagination had been touched. These 
concessions of Herbert’s still left her a little uncertain. ‘‘ I 
wonder whether I shall find Mrs. Detmond primitive,” she 
reflected. 

“ No : I think only like other people.” 

“ Or see the old Eve in her.” 

Voysey laughed. “ It would be interesting if you did see 
the old Eve,” he exclaimed. 

“There was something you saw in her,” Miss Voysey 
insisted. 

“ Perhaps, just a something,” he admitted. “ But if you 
call, you will have plenty of opportunity for making dis- 
coveries — though, by the way, let me warn you she is shy. 
But now, let me do something for you. Haven’t I heard 
you say you would like to meet Russell, the author of The 
Limits of the Beautiful? I met him this afternoon: he got 
into my carriage at Baker Street, and we travelled to Bedford 
Park together : he was on his way to Kew. He happened 
to tell me he was going to Mrs. Heneage’s to-morrow. I 
intended to let myself off this time. Mrs. Heneage is a 
charming person, and I am very fond of her; but these 
gatherings of hers are too hurried, too hurried, I mean, even 


VOYSEY 


85 


for London. She introduces one to too many people. But 
I will come to Mrs. Heneage’s to-morrow if you like, and 
see whether I can’t capture Russell for you.” 

“ Ah, that is good of you ! ” cried Miss Voysey, unfeignedly 
pleased. “ I should very much like to meet Mr. Russell. 
He ought to be very interesting. Did you have any interest- 
ing talk with him ? ” 

“Well, we talked about dogs.” 

Miss Voysey smiled — very faintly. 

“ He has a fox-terrier that appears to have a good deal of 
character : we discussed his ways. But if I can secure him 
to-morrow, we will try to get nearer the Beautiful than that.” 

“ He has written an immensely clever book,” said Miss 
Voysey, gravely. 

“ And he has written it like a man of letters.” 

Miss Voysey thought a moment or two. “ Of course,” 
she apologized, “one doesn’t accept a great deal that he says. 
Some of his ideas are absurd. And most of them are very 
subversive.” 

“Yes: but I think one accepts his principal conclusion — 
I mean, of course, on the popular side — if one can call it 
his, that it is the turn of the undesirable people. In politics, 
it is the turn of the masses; in literature — well, heroes and 
heroines have had their day ; in art, it is the turn of what is 
not beautiful. Of what, at first sight, is not beautiful. The 
important thing is that we should do what we are best at 
doing, and it looks just now as if the beautiful and the heroic 
are not what we can do best.” 

“ I suppose some people would say that we might wait till 
we are more happily inspired ? ” 

“ Ah, I think that would be a mistake. In spite of our 
absurdities, and goodness knows they are often immense ! I 
believe our inspirations are not unhappy. We have a feeling 
of our own for these undesirable people — and rather unlovely 


86 


VOYSEY 


things : we understand them as perhaps, though it sounds a 
little audacious, no one has ever understood them before. I 
think we have put enough original feeling into our best efforts 
to justify them pretty handsomely.’’ 

“Ah, but Mr. Russell goes further than that,” said Miss 
Voysey. “ He strikes a blow at self-sacrifice. He puts char- 
acter before everything : before goodness, before morality, 
before — before all one has ever believed in ! ” 

The whimsicalness of expression in Herbert’s face showed 
that he felt the provocation. “ Ah, things have become so 
difficult,” he said. “We have so many standards, so many 
points of view. But I suspect what it all comes to is pretty 
much this : we protest against the same excellence being pre- 
scribed for all of us. Clearly, a great many of us are not at 
our best when we are good. We do not make the world our 
best contribution by being good. It is a fine thing, of course, 
and it must always be a fine thing, to ‘ keep innocency,’ but 
it has come home to us that a vast proportion of the people 
who have been most complete have not kept innocency, and 
that they could not have given us what they have given if 
they had. We believe very much in completeness : we give 
an immense place to the power, the efficiency, the resource- 
fulness, that come from wide and manifold experience. We 
feel that there are many kinds of excellence : and that even 
if goodness is the best kind, still it is but one kind. And we 
are very brave in expressing what we feel. Our courage is 
mistaken sometimes for flippancy — but we are not flippant. 
We are very much in earnest. We take everything seriously. 
We take even morals seriously — and morals have always 
been so difficult. There was a time v/hen morals were only 
taken for granted. . . . No, the problem for us would seem 
to be to discover, if we can, what is the best we are capable 
of, where our strong points really lie. For it doesn’t do,” he 
added, yielding to his mirth, “ to take even one’s evil propensities 


VOYSEY 


87 


too much for granted. One may be capable of better things 
than one thinks.” 

With this Miss Voysey was ready to agree. “ There is 
always conscience,” she said. 

Their talk for a time then drifted to other things, while 
the dinner moved on to dessert. By and by, when they were 
alone once more. Miss Voysey suddenly leaned to one side 
of the table to avoid the candles, and looking at Herbert, 
said : — 

“ I wish you would write something ! ” 

“ My dear aunt ! ” 

“You could. You could write something good.” 

“ About the Beautiful ? ” 

“ I don’t care what it’s about — if you will only give your- 
self to it.” 

Voysey laughed. 

“ Ah, you are never serious,” she reproached him. 

“ Don’t say that ! The limits of the Beautiful is very 
serious.” 

“ I wish you would give yourself to something,” she 
insisted. 

He looked at her, and it touched him to see how much 
kindness it was her eager face expressed. Certainly, she was 
very fond of him. “That terrible something ! he sighed. 
“ That elusive something ! If one could only change it into 
some one definite thing ! ” 

“ You could. There is so much you could do.” 

“Too much, I am afraid.” 

“ You have written. Those articles of yours were very 
good.” 

“ If I could get beyond them ! ” 

“ You have only to try.” 

“ I ought to have left them behind long ago. What one 
does is the measure of what one can do.” 


88 


VOYSEY 


‘‘ You have too high a standard, you know/’ 

“ Oh, those articles of mine were poor things ; there was 
nothing in them.” 

Miss Voysey sighed. “ Your father was a great success.” 

“ He was indeed.” 

“ And Nell will be a success.” 

“ Nell is a success already. It is a success to be Nell.” 

“ And you ” 

“ Ah, no ; I am not a success.” 

Miss Voysey sighed again; — and presently she rose from 
the table. It was not very often they talked of these things : 
she gave them too much importance ; she took them too much 
to heart, not to shrink from cheapening them by frequent dis- 
cussion. She moved to the door. Herbert opened it for her. 

“ You are a dear old fellow,” she said, looking up at him 
with an expression he knew so well that he stooped and 
allowed her to kiss him. “ You may say what you like, but 
I shall always expect something from you.” 

“ Ah, my dear aunt ! ” he protested. “ It would be so much 
kinder not to expect.” 

Miss Voysey left him, and crossing the hall, whose former 
austerity her efforts had helped to soften, and from which 
Nelson’s large hooded dark leathern chair had been removed 
since the days of the patients, took her way up-stairs to the 
cool obscurity of the drawing-room, where, being still a little 
agitated from their talk, she paced for a while through the 
shadows and the dim lamplight before she lighted the shaded 
candles on her table. It was impossible for her not to expect. 
Her ambition for her nephew was not of the popular, not of 
what one may perhaps call the more contentious and the 
noisier kind : his worldly position would be difficult to im- 
prove, and his income was at all events sufficient : she was 
not averse from success in its louder and more popularly tri- 
umphant forms — she respected all success — but with such 


VOYSEY 


89 


conquests it had not been her custom to associate him : it was 
rather that her critical instinct claimed recognition for his gifts 
from the gifted persons able to appreciate them. In perfect 
good faith she compared him with the people she met and 
found him superior, just as in the old days she had compared 
her brother whose equal she had failed to meet ; — and it vexed 
her that in a world in which laurel-wreaths appeared almost 
too plentiful at times, such merits as his should still remain 
uncrowned. And, as was only natural, seeing the greatness 
of her interest in books, a peculiar flavour lay for her in the 
thought of the young man’s achievement being literary ; it 
would amuse her so much to read a book of his, to hear peo- 
ple talk of it, to see it in the columns of reviews. Sometimes 
she hoped he would marry : a clever woman, and of course 
his wife would be clever, might have great influence with him. 
But this was something of a desperate hope : her present life 
was very pleasant to her, and the idea of giving it up was deep 
in desolation and dismay. The threads that held the present 
arrangement together were none too robust, she knew, her place 
in the house of her nephew and niece depending upon a variety 
of contingencies : and if there were times when the remem- 
brance of this gave a quickened eagerness to her enjoyment, 
there were times too when it made her sad. In spite of her 
affection for the young people, in spite of their companionship, 
there were moments when her life was lonely. 


V 


In due course, making use of a vacant afternoon, she kept 
her promise and paid her call upon Mrs. Detmond. It proved 
an uneventful experience. Miss Voysey liked the picturesque- 
ness of the house, whose situation seemed to her cheerful, and 
her decision as to Mrs. Detmond was that she was an unas- 
suming, unobtrusive person whose acquaintance she was not 
at all unwilling to accept. Indeed, on the whole, her impres- 
sion was kindly : Mrs. Detmond might not, as the saying is, 
have very much in her, but she appeared to be sensible, and 
there was no doubt that she wished to be pleasant. All things 
considered, as she told Herbert when she spoke of her visit. 
Miss Voysey was disposed to like Mrs. Detmond. 

“ And didn’t you find her primitive ? ” Herbert inquired. 

“ She was a little shy just at first — if that’s what you 
mean.” 

“Well, no, not altogether. And you liked the house.” 

“ Yes, it is a pretty house. And I think it is a pretty 
drawing-room. I liked the window. The window is very 
quaint.” 

“Yes, it is all very quaint,” he said. 

Miss Voysey’s ear caught the note of criticism. It was a 
note for which, in her respect for the young man’s decisions, 
she was sometimes curious enough to listen. “ You don’t 
like the house ? ” she suggested. 

“ It all seemed to me a trifle too quaint,” he said. 

Miss Voysey had not received this impression, and to as- 
certain his point of view would have been of interest to her; 
but here, as it chanced, the matter was allowed to rest. 

90 


VOYSEY 


91 


After a short interval Mrs. Detmond returned the call. 

Miss Voysey was at home, and Mrs. Detmond had not 
been with her many minutes when Herbert himself came in. 
At the moment, however, of Emily’s entering the drawing- 
room Miss Voysey was engaged in the difficult task of enter- 
taining two people who were strangers to each other, and the 
promotion of whose better acquaintance, as is often the way 
in such cases, was severely taxing her powers. One of the 
callers was a somewhat elaborately dressed old lady, who was 
tall, upright, alert, with a large face under a large bonnet, and 
who, in her manner of speech, was at once incisive and in- 
cessant. Observations fell from her with a detached abrupt- 
ness — yet they continued to fall. She was the widow of a 
former Attorney-General, Sir Charles Luttrell, an old friend 
of Dr. Voysey’s, was a connection in a distant way of Her- 
bert’s mother, and happened, besides, to be a godmother of 
Nell’s. Of the other caller, who lived at Chelsea, it is enough, 
perhaps, to say that she was a pretty woman of thirty. The 
carriages of the two ladies were waiting in the street below. 
And in her own little chair, with Lady Luttrell in an arm- 
chair beside her, and Mrs. Oakley a little way off on the other 
side of the tea-table, sat Miss Voysey, who in her quiet, well- 
bred way made spirited little attempts from time to time to 
adjust the balance of conversation more evenly between her 
visitors : but her intentions were not rewarded. The old lady 
declined either to share the conversation with her fellow- 
caller, or to make it interesting to her. 

In these conditions the arrival of Mrs. Detmond might have 
been a material gain. Emily, however, was not good at the 
entertainment of strangers, and such presence of mind as she 
possessed was gravely tried from the moment of her entering 
the room. For not only was the scene unfamiliar to her and 
her acquaintance even with Miss Voysey very slight, but Lady 
Luttrell, who was annoyed at the interruption, observed her 


92 


VOYSEY 


as she shook hands with their hostess with a stare of incredulity 
that had the worst possible effect upon her shyness. It was 
not till Herbert joined the four women that matters really 
improved. His appearance had the effect of changing the 
atmosphere for them, it made the air of the room feel lighter. 
There was a happy freedom in his manner, a personal note 
even in the commonplaces of his greeting, that conveyed a 
cheerful promise of relief, that reduced the presence of the 
despotic old lady, and made it less pervading and oppressive. 
Lady Luttrell at once took possession of him. Miss Voysey 
moving to a chair between Mrs. Oakley and Mrs. Detmond. 
Emily, who was watching him, fancied he talked to the old 
lady in the same easy, personal way in which he had talked 
to herself, — and it was a show of courage that impressed her. 

Lady Luttrell was the first to leave. Miss Voysey moved 
back to her own little chair, and Mrs. Oakley took the seat 
that had been occupied by Lady Luttrell. Voysey crossed 
over to Mrs. Detmond. 

He had by no means forgotten her this time. On the 
contrary, the remembrance of their talk, and of the point of 
comprehension they had reached through it, gave him — it 
was so definite! — a half-amused, half-reluctant sense of com- 
mittal. In the change of manner with which she welcomed 
him there was a touch of expectation, which made him won- 
der for the moment whether he might not have been a trifle 
reckless in using the opportunities of his call. The feeling, 
however, was momentary. Nothing of any consequence had 
passed between them ; there could be no demand in the change 
to which he would not be willing to respond. And, indeed, 
his response, if a little measured just at first, was soon suffi- 
ciently friendly. He saw that she looked uncomfortable : she 
was depay see ; morally, as he divined, she was more or less out 
of her element : while, physically, she had put herself at a 
disadvantage, as shy people are apt to do, by taking a chair 


VOYSEY 


93 


that was very much too small and low. Her personal advan- 
tages were considerable, and she had taste enough, as he had 
already observed, to enable her to do them justice ; her figure 
should have made a pleasant addition to her surroundings — 
to the handsome, habitable room, the lively attire of Mrs. 
Oakley, Miss Voysey’s well-chosen plainness, and the easy 
figure of the young man beside her in the well-hung London 
frock-coat. As it was, as she sat cramped and upright in her 
little chair, nursing her tea-cup, which she had failed to see 
she might deposit on the small table at her elbow, she offered 
an appearance of mental and physical contraction that pro- 
duced an effect of slightly absurd incongruity. From this 
disadvantage it was Voysey’s first care to rescue her. He 
relieved her of the tea-cup, and proposed a change of seat. 

“ My aunt has let you take an uncommonly uncomfortable 
little chair,’’ he apologized, “ and it is very wrong of her, for 
as a matter of fact we have one or two rather comfortable 
things about. Will you try the sofa?” he asked, indicating 
a piece of furniture, not unlike her own sofa at home, that 
stood near the middle of the three high windows. “ If you 
feel the window,” he added, ‘‘ I will shut it.” 

Emily, who followed him past the end of the piano and the 
floor-lamp standing beside it with evident gratitude for his 
attention, declared that the fresh air would be agreeable to her. 
Her satisfaction as she accepted the comfort of the cushions 
and settled herself among them seemed to him oddly expres- 
sive ; it revived with great vividness one of the finer impres- 
sions of his call. But still she looked out of her element ; she 
was finding this visit an experience, she was making a good 
deal too much of it. He was suddenly aware that he was sorry 
for her : he divined that she was making some small appeal to 
him for forbearance, and he determined to abate the usual 
lively, and perhaps slightly too intimate, tone of his talk. 

This is a very pretty room,” she was saying. 


94 


VOYSEY 


« You like it ? ” 

“Yes, I like it very much.” 

“ My sister and aunt are responsible for it. They had 
rather a difficult foundation to build upon. My father was at 
our point of view about many things, but, somehow, he had 
not the right feeling for bibelots. My mother, too, was at 
our point of view, but I think they were both too busy about 
what seemed to be the kernel in those days to do much in the 
way of decorating the shell.” 

“ Haven’t you,” she asked, looking about her, “ haven’t you 
had something to do with it ? ” 

“ I ? Oh no, not much. I am not much good. I have 
only an eye for results. If I were left to myself, I should live 
in a very crude shell.” 

“ People are very old-fashioned still in the country.” 

“ So I have heard.” 

“They don’t know how uncomfortable they are.” 

“ And, I suppose, it is kinder not to let them know.” 

“ I am not sure. I think people ought to try to be a little 
modern.” 

“ Ah, it’s so difficult ! It is so difficult to be modern ! ” 

“ Do you think so ? ” 

“ You see one has to try to be modern all round. It is no 
good getting the nasty corners off one’s chairs and sofas, if one 
leaves angles sticking in one’s mind. And really without their 
angles — without their prejudices and so on — some people 
would have no character at all. But,” he added sympatheti- 
cally, “I am afraid you have suffered from the country. Per- 
haps a good deal ? ” 

“ I don’t know that I have exactly suffered,” she said. “ I 
am very fond of the country.” 

“ Yes : I remember we talked about this.” 

“ But one likes a house to look modern. There are such 
pretty things to be got now-a-days.” 


VOYSEY 


95 


“I should say, certainly, you have succeeded in making 
your house look modern,” he assured her, quite gravely. 

She was silent a moment. She moved a little on the sofa, 
and looked at the bank of marguerites in the flower-box 
enlivening the balcony : they made a screen for the lower 
part of the window. 

“ You feel the window,” he said, interpreting her glance. 
“ Let me shut it. It has turned horribly cold. Our climate 
is always doing these disagreeable things.” 

And he rose from his chair as he spoke. 

“ No, I don’t feel it : please don’t shut it,” she protested. 
And then looking up at him as he still stood by the window, 
encouraged by something in his attitude, she added, “ Did you 
think so, really ? ” 

Just for a moment the point of her question escaped him. 
He happened to have glanced down into the grey and sunless 
street, and had forgotten his allusion to her house. In an 
instant, however, he remembered. 

“ I should say you have things very much as you would 
wish to have them,” he answered. He withdrew his eyes from 
the street, and looked at her. Her eyes were still fixed upon 
him. He feared she felt the want of conviction in his answer, 
and conscious of a desire to make it convincing, added, “ Un- 
doubtedly, your house has the modern look.” 

She glanced over the bank of marguerites at the house oppo- 
site. At one of the upper windows a nurse, in a somewhat 
elaborate white apron, was standing with a child in her arms. 

‘‘ Having no one who can ever give one suggestions makes 
it rather difficult,” she said. 

“ Mr. Detmond, I suppose, is like me : he has only an eye 
for results ? ” 

Her eyes turned from the opposite house. Their expres- 
sion startled him. He had by no means suggested the com- 
parison with any fatuous thought of profiting by it. 


96 


VOYSEY 


“ Do you care for suggestions ? ” he asked, anxious, if 
possible, to get away ; “ it is more amusing, isn’t it, to follow 
one’s own ideas ? ” 

In her change of attitude a fold of her dress, which fell 
with a soft amplitude about her, had got slightly into disarray : 
she moved a little and attended to it. It occurred to him, as 
he watched her, that she had the power of conveying a curi- 
ously distinct impression. She possessed individuality. He 
was not able to explain to himself how the impression was 
conveyed ; he would have said that in salient characteristics 
she was really deficient: but clearly she did impress him — in 
an odd way she was possessive. 

“ One wants to have some one who is interested in what 
one does,” she said. 

“Yes,” he admitted, “that, I think, one does want.” 

“ Some one who cares about things.” 

“Some one who understands.” 

“ Yes, who understands,” she repeated. 

“ The small things, the little, every-day things, the things 
that are always going on.” 

“Yes, every one understands the others. The things that 
only happen now and then.” 

“ The great things ! But the point of the small things is 
that they are always happening ! That they are really going 
on all the time ! ” 

“ Yes, for women they are. But people talk as if the others 
were everything . . . Women, really, are so different!” she 
exclaimed. 

“ That’s just it : men and women are so diflFerent,” he 
said. 

He looked into the street. A doctor’s brougham with a 
fine pair of horses had drawn up to the pavement opposite ; 
he watched the doctor, who had a small black bag in his hand, 
step out, turn briskly to close the door of the brougham, and 


VOYSEY 


97 


take out his latch-key as he crossed the pavement. The doc- 
tor was personally known to him, and with these afternoon 
arrivals of his he had been familiar ever since the days of his 
childhood ; indeed he could remember, as a child, watching 
him — or was it his predecessor? — every afternoon from his 
nursery window up-stairs. Dr. Voysey’s rounds having ended, 
usually, somewhat later. And, on a sudden, across his 
thoughts of the moment there flashed, as he watched the 
brougham that was now moving away, a vision of himself and 
of the world as it had looked to him in the shadowy days of his 
childhood ; and the vision had the curious effect of producing 
a further abatement of his humour in favour of a deeper 
response to Emily. It came home to him that, in a certain 
sense, he had hitherto been missing the point of her. 

“ Miss Voysey told me about your sister the other day,’’ 
Emily was saying a moment or two afterwards. 

“Ah, about Nell.” 

“ She is very clever, isn’t she ? ” 

“ I suppose so : but there are better things to be said of 
her.” 

“ You don’t believe in women going to college and that 
sort of thing ? ” 

“ I believe in it for Nell.” 

“ But you don’t want everybody to ? ” 

“ I would give people opportunities, I think, and let them 
please themselves. Certainly, I have known some very nice 
women who have not been to college.” 

Emily deliberated. “ I think I could have told you had a 
sister,” she presently informed him. 

“ Nell and I are great friends,” he said. 

“And Miss Voysey is very clever,” she added. 

“ Ah, you saw that too ? ” 

“She is, isn’t she ? ” 

“ There are a good many things my aunt is interested in,’^ 

H 


98 


VOYSEY 


he answered. “ She told me she liked your house very much,” 
he added pleasantly. 

Mrs. Detmond looked pleased. “ It is very different to 
yours,” she said. “ I have not known many clever people,” 
she went on to explain. 

“ There are said to be some at Bedford Park.” 

“Artists and people ? I suppose so. We don’t know any 
of them.” 

“ And in the country ? You didn’t happen to meet them 
in the country ? ” 

“ I don’t think there were any. Our rector was supposed 
to be rather clever ; he wrote for some paper or other ; and 
there were some men who were at college — that was about 
all, I think.” 

“You played tennis with them, I expect — with the young 
men ? ” 

“ One had to. But I don’t care for tennis.” 

“Well, I am not sure that you have lost very much,” he 
consoled her. “ Clever people are not invariably a resource.” 

She was silent. She was looking again at the house 
opposite. 

“ One wishes one knew more about things,” she reflected. 

“ Books ! Do you find books any good ? ” 

“No, I don’t mean that. One wishes one knew more 
about — about things in general ! ” 

“ Ah, I see. More about life ? ” 

“Yes, that’s it. Things turn out so differently,” she said. 

“ They do indeed,” he agreed with her. 

“ People don’t tell one enough about them beforehand.” 

“ And the worst of it is,. I don’t see how they are to tell 
one more.” 

“ They might tell one what they know.” 

“ They don’t know : that’s where it is. They don’t know 
how things will turn out.” 


VOYSEY 


99 


“ Some people seem to know,” she insisted. 

They must be persons of exceptional insight.” 

She looked at him. He smiled as he met her look. “ I 
should have thought,” she said, and his smile seemed to 
encourage her, “you knew!” 

He started. “Ah, why ? ” he exclaimed. “Tell me why 
you should think so.” 

Her colour deepened. This talk was a little more direct 
than the kind of talk she was accustomed to. “ I don’t think 
I can. You talk as if you did.” 

“ I rather fancied,” he laughed, “ I had been talking as if I 
didn’t I ” 

“ I thought you did.” 

“ No, I am afraid not. I have been out of it pretty con- 
siderably in my time — and out of it pretty often, too ! ” 

The admission clearly failed to impress her. There were 
signs that another question was on the point of breaking from 
her embarrassment, when Mrs. Oakley, who had just said 
good-bye to their hostess, moved to the door, and Herbert 
crossed over and opened it for her. Miss Voysey joined 
Mrs. Detmond, who, however, after a minute or two of a 
little lingering spiritless talk, rose too, and Miss Voysey, 
whom the fatigues of a long afternoon had tired, acquiesced 
in Mrs. Detmond’s movement. Herbert went down with 
Emily to the hall, where Nelson was on duty at the door. 

“ How are you going to the station ? ” Voysey inquired. 
“ Shall Nelson call you a hansom ? ” 

She thanked him, and spoke of walking to Portland Road. 
Her husband, she said, had told her that it was but a few 
minutes’ walk from Harley Street to Portland Road. Voysey 
endorsed the information, and declared he would walk to the 
station with her. 

The little walk appeared to Voysey, with whom, however, 
the sympathetic impulses were now tempered by his habitual 

L ofC. 


lOO 


VOYSEY 


humour, as of the nature of a sequel to the conversation that 
had just been passing between them j it was in harmony with 
his general impressions. He knew Emily was dressed well 
enough for a still gayer region than this, but his impression 
of her being out of her element was as strong as it had been 
a few minutes before in the drawing-room. An aloofness so 
complete, in these days of manifold opportunities, seemed to 
him almost remarkable : London had failed to attach her either 
by a cursory attraction to its amusements or by a superficial 
knowledge of its streets. As he trod the familiar pavements 
by her side, he was struck by an incongruity in her being there, 
while in his interest in her (he admitted the interest) there 
was something a good deal more incongruous still. It was some 
time since he had been interested in a person who appeared 
to have come from such a long way off. And it was not 
unpleasant, he discovered, once and away, to be with a person 
whose desire to be modern expressed itself merely in the curious 
adornment of a window or the choice of an unusual colour for 
a door. At the same time his belief in an emotional, expectant 
side to her had been confirmed, at this further point of com- 
prehension they had reached. That there were things that 
interested her, he felt pretty sure ; that there was something 
she wanted, something she was in search of, something she 
wanted very much. And it was just this that made the open- 
ing for his sympathy ; she gave him, even more than most 
women, a sense that she was missing the mark; from her 
conversation, and the revelations of that absurdly decorative 
little villa, he divined some immense misconceptions; while 
to Arthur’s genial futility, he permitted himself to imagine, 
might perhaps be attributed something still more serious than 
misconception. 

They reached the station at Portland Road, and Voysey, 
having taken a ticket for her, led the way down the toil- 
stained, weary-looking stairs to the subterranean obscurity 


VOYSEY 


lOI 


below. The gate at the foot of the stairs was closed, for a 
gleaming, crowded train happened to be just in motion ; they 
waited in the company of a greasy young woman, with a pro- 
digious black fringe and a large black bundle, until a porter, 
pale and very warm, unlocked the gate and admitted them. 

Emily’s train would not be the next by some two or three, 
and they took a turn down the platform. 

“ I detest the Underground ! ” she exclaimed. 

“ It would be difficult to defend Portland Road,” he con- 
ceded. “ But I think the Underground has its points.” 

“ It is useful, you mean ? ” 

“ It is so very much of London.” 

She made a movement of disgust. “ It is the worst of all,” 
she said. 

“ Ah, you see too many bad things. I should like to ex- 
tend your sympathies.” 

They sauntered along the platform, one half of which, with 
the lining of advertisements and border of white above the 
metals, was in daylight — a crude, wan daylight that descended 
from the unroofed openings above; the other half was in a 
vaporous, dismal obscurity, in which the lighted, large-globed 
lamps made reflections on the low, dirty, white-washed arch 
of the roof. At the daylight end workpeople with the vari- 
ous accompaniments of labour — the guard’s can, the tool- 
bag, the pipe, the soiled person — were waiting for the hard 
accommodation of the unblessed Third ; at the other end dim 
figures were moving in the gas-lit vapours through which the 
signal, from the deeper murkiness of the tunnel, shone red 
like an eye of light. Emily and Voysey were strolling in the 
direction of the signal. 

“You think me very narrow,” she said. 

He laughed. “Weren’t we talking just now of knowing 
more about things ? ” he hinted. 

They turned, and strolled back towards the daylight. 


102 


VOYSEY 


“ That is different,” she said. 

I am not so sure. Things hang curiously together. 
Knowing about certain things may lead one unexpectedly to 
knowing about other things — other quite different things. 
That is the mistake women make, you know ; they don't 
know about different things enough.” 

They paused under the last of the gas-lamps, which, as it 
hung within reach of the daylight, had not been lighted. She 
turned to him, and he was startled to see she had just that 
expression which had so taken him aback when he had made 
the chance allusion to her husband. It was a look that seemed 
to change the position of things, to re-distribute their values. 
It was like a dive below the surface ; it made him suddenly 
aware of how great the difference was between what lay upon 
the surface and what might possibly be found in the depths. 
And there was that in him which was so ready for dives of 
this kind into the depths, that for a moment he was conscious 
of a reckless desire to take the plunge, to have his fling and see 
what would come of it. 

He put the impulse by, however, and they strolled on. But 
the impulse was there long enough for him to experience an 
awakening to livelier possibilities of adventure. It occurred 
to him with some force that sympathy with a young married 
woman, who is handsome as well as expectant and emotional, 
is an act of kindness at which the gods are liable to laugh. 

They had not very much more talk, for the abominable 
atmosphere kept her coughing, and the situation, in itself, 
little desirous as he was of making any contribution to the 
divine mirth, provided him with an interest that was quite 
sufficient. The troubling expression passed ; things seemed 
to drop back into the old position ; and if he found that he 
failed to regain quite a complete detachment, it was only 
because he was more alive to the suggestion of her dependence 
upon him, and a dependence for something more than the 


VOYSEY 


103 


mere comfort of the moment. He realized, as he took the 
position in, that she was in some way making an appeal to 
him, that her attitude almost from the first had been of the 
nature of an appeal ; and his recognition of this was not the 
less sure because the precise nature of the appeal, and the pre- 
cise measure of response he was prepared to offer to it, were 
still very vague and indefinite. 

At all events, when presently, with an accompaniment of 
gleaming lights and escaping steam, another train rushed in, 
the furnace of the engine flashing a fiery circle on the arch of 
the roof as it passed, he acknowledged it was a distinct relief 
to him to be informed that the train was hers ; and he dis- 
covered, when, a few minutes later, he returned to the upper 
air, that the satisfaction he found in the freedom and move- 
ment of the street and the cheerfulness of the unchecked day- 
light was not by any means diminished by the knowledge that 
he was again at his own disposal. 


VI 


It is probable that Voysey’s next appearance at Bedford 
Park would have been divided from Emily’s visit by a some- 
what protracted interval, if one afternoon Arthur had not 
called at his club and given him an invitation to dinner, and 
given it with so modest a recognition of the importance of the 
occasion to his wife and himself that he made it impossible for 
Voysey to refuse. And so it came to pass that one evening, 
a good deal sooner than he expected, Voysey found himself 
once more following one of the asphalt paths of the sadly 
suburban little Green, to whose almost conscious publicity 
the natural pleasantness of the evening was lending a fleeting 
charm. After the turbid streets, in which, when he left them, 
there was the familiar variance between the weariness of the 
spent day, and the restless beginnings of the dissipation of the 
evening, it was soothing to find a place where the influences of 
the hour pretty much had their way : he was glad to see what 
the mellowing light could do with the soiled red roofs, the 
angles and gables, the general quaintness of the white- 
windowed little houses behind the trees. He admitted it 
could do a good deal ; it could produce an appearance of 
picturesqueness which for the moment seemed not altogether 
an illusion. 

He crossed the Green, and having re-discovered the 
Detmonds’ house, passed up the strip of red tiles leading to 
the courageous front-door. A casement of the drawing-room 
window was open, and there came to him a murmur of voices. 
It prepared him to find — as indeed was the case — that he was 
the last guest to arrive. The drawing-room, when the servant 

104 


VOYSEY 


105 


admitted him to it, was in an obscure half-light ; the glow of 
the evening came through the long window as it might have 
come through a window in a picture, but it came deepened by 
the shadow of the chestnut-tree in the garden of the next house, 
and the twilight was dim enough to have justified the lighting 
of the lamp on the small table by the piano. The room 
seemed to be full ; he received an impression of people sitting 
in unexpected places, and talking with an animation that, even 
to his experience, scarcely appeared superficial. Another of 
his impressions, as he moved forward to his hostess, was that 
the dress of a lady who was seated near the lamp shone with 
brilliance — a brilliance even beyond that of unmitigated yellow 

— in the dimness which left the shades of other dresses con- 
jectural. For the moment the sense of familiarity with the 
room, with the various little ingenuities his judgment had 
provoked him to criticise, which his call that Sunday had 
given him, and which his talks with Miss Voysey had tended 
to keep vivid, was effaced amid these preliminary conditions 
of hospitality : the sight, however, of Mrs. Detmond’s figure 

— it happened that his eye missed Arthur’s — forcibly stirred 
remembrance. Emily was sitting on the sofa; it had been 
moved a little — a little nearer to the window ; all there was of 
the uncertain light was upon her, and the distinctness with 
which her face, with its firmness of outline that just touched 
heaviness in the lower part, detached itself from the dusk, 
enabled him to see that it had its deceptive covering of 
placidity. He saw she was exceedingly nervous. Her look, 
as their eyes met, told him this, and told him at the same time 
that it was a discovery she was prepared for him to make. She 
was dressed with the discretion he expected from her, with a 
modest enjoyment of the opportunities of an evening gown : 
still the graceful maturity of her figure was not concealed, and 
she gave him the feeling (it was one of the first she had given 
him) that it was curious that the possession of personal 


io6 


VOYSEY 


advantages so marked as hers should not have led to the over- 
coming of the hesitations, the too evident diffidence, of her 
manner. He was only by her side a few minutes, for there 
were certain introductions (among them one to a lady in red 
who was near her) that, with the eager precipitation of a ner- 
vous person, she impetuously hastened to effect for him ; but, 
brief as it was, their talk was quite long enough to revive his 
memory of their other talks, and to prove, what the appeal of 
her look had proved already, that matters stood just where they 
had left them. 

The lady to whom he was introduced was Arthur’s cousin. 
Miss Detmond, a daughter of his uncle and partner ; she was 
a woman approaching thirty, spare, dark, wan, rather large- 
featured, with an austere expanse of forehead and deep-set 
eyes. Her manner showed clearly that the passing scene had 
ceased to afford any novelty of impression; and Voysey 
suspected that she might have arrived too soon. She had the 
air of a person who had had time to become familiar with 
the scene. On the other hand, — he doubted whether she 
was an observant person. Nothing about her suggested ob- 
jection ; he was inclined to think, on the contrary, that she 
might have convictions to which too critical an attitude would 
not be welcome. The absence of expectation with which 
she received him was a little discouraging ; but he found sev- 
eral interpretations for it : in the end he chose the simple one 
that she was waiting for her dinner, and the humanity of the 
thought attracted him. 

There was still an interval before the passing of the company 
to the dining-room, and Voysey, having shaken hands with 
Arthur, who at last appeared from the other side of the room, 
used it to verify his impressions. His eye fell again upon the 
lady by the lamp, the decision of colour in whose dress he 
discovered to be a sort of natural endorsement of the marked 
decision in her features; she was not, he saw, the kind of 


VOYSEY 


107 


woman to appreciate line shades, and her voice, too (the room 
was small, and he was near her), suffered from a considerable 
want of modulation. She was talking to an old gentleman 
with a fresh complexion and shrewd, close-clipped, white whis- 
kers, with a hanging lower lip and rather prominent eyes, who 
was stout and who, though his comfortable person gave not 
the least hint at diffidence, seemed to need an interval of a quiet 
second or two in which to get an observation ready : this the lady 
in yellow never gave him, and together with a look of strained 
endeavour in the old gentleman’s face, as he fruitlessly chased 
the butterfly of opportunity from pause to pause in the good 
lady’s talk, there was a look of bewilderment, as if he were an 
old gentleman who was not accustomed to the baffling of his 
conversational enterprise. Indeed it appeared to Voysey that 
he was likely to have known few defeats j his person bore the 
marks of great domestic and commercial prosperity ; and when 
it had come home to him that this must be Mr. Edward Det- 
mond, Arthur’s invaluable partner and relative. Miss Detmond’s 
detachment gained a new interest. He felt the old gentleman 
explained her. The dinner interpretation looked trivial : in 
the life of the mansion at Hampstead (Arthur had mentioned 
his uncle’s house) he fancied there might have been worse 
postponements than this. None of the other guests moved 
his curiosity. There were two young girls who were sisters, 
a tall man of whom he could see nothing but the back, and 
another tall man with a flowing beard who was standing 
near Emily, and who was the husband of the voluble lady 
of the dress. A little later he learned that Mr. and Mrs. 
Atkinson lived at Notting Hill, the two girls being their 
daughters. 

Voysey took Miss Detmond in to dinner. It was to his 
credit that if he had a quick perception of a disadvantage, he 
had a readiness to sympathize with the sufferer from one — a 
readiness that often led to his exerting himself for the enter- 


io8 


VOYSEY 


tainment of singularly difficult and unpromising persons. This 
evening it induced him to explore the interests of Miss Det- 
mond. And, in the end, he discovered an interest. Miss 
Detmond had a peculiar knowledge of Europe, which she had 
gained in the search, apparently, for a convincing dietary 
system. 

“ I think I know all the cures,” she said. 

“ It is fortunate that so many of them take one to picturesque 
places,” he observed. 

She assented to this; but it was clearly not her point of 
view. 

“ One can’t enjoy the scenery,” she explained. “ One has 
no time. I mean, there is always something to be thought 
of. One is always worrying lest one should forget the next 
thing. I have been at places where something had to be 
taken nearly every two hours. It keeps one in a perpetual 
fidget.” 

“ Is life worth it ? ” he hazarded, loosely. 

As soon as he had said it he was a little anxious ; there was 
an austerity in Miss Detmond’s face that seemed unfavourable 
to the acceptance of loose conjectures upon life. 

“ I suppose another person’s may be,” she answered gravely, 
but without resentment. 

Voysey was relieved. He was glad to find he had not 
jarred upon her, and he was glad, too, to think that it was not 
she herself who had been the subject of these distressing 
experiments. This discovery, however, gave him a movement 
of curiosity. He looked at the old gentleman again. At that 
moment Mr. Detmond was abandoning himself to a pate with 
an unreserve that suggested the finest absence of restriction. 
If it had been for his sake that these dreary experiences had 
been endured, Voysey felt it would be unpardonable. 

“ I hope so,” he said, yielding to the provocation of the 
thought ; “ but some people are uncommonly tiresome.” 


VOYSEY 


109 

She was silent a moment. He fancied he had taken her 
still further from her point of view. 

“ You have never travelled for your health, perhaps ? ” 

Voysey told her that unfortunately he had; he often, he 
assured her, sought happier mental conditions in a change of 
scene; but his troubles, he admitted, had not been of this 
particular kind. “ I travel just because I have become tire- 
some,” he declared : “ or, at least, I like to think so.” 

She was silent again. He conceived this reason for travel- 
ling might seem unusual to her, and that possibly she was 
considering it. Her reply, however, hardly justified the 
inference. 

“ Those health places are often rather interesting,” she 
observed, brightening, with a smile that appeared to have a 
promise of expansion. “ Some of the cures are so strange ! ” 

Voysey was amused. “ Discomfort is a tune that lends 
itself to variations,” he submitted. 

“ Some of the treatments are very peculiar,” she repeated. 
“ People are required to do the very last things one would 
expect to be good for them. It is really rather uncomfortable 
sometimes. One can put up with a good deal,” she went on, 
her manner still bright, “ but I confess I don’t like it when, 
for instance, they won’t let you have butter. At a place we 
tried last autumn they wouldn’t let you have it even if you 
were not taking the cure.” 

Voysey’s eye sought Mr. Detmond. He had just finished 
his pate. He looked astonishingly unlike a man to submit to 
that kind of deprivation. 

“ It was very rigorous,” he said. 

“ And some of the cases one comes across are so curious,” 
Miss Detmond continued, reviving memories of things that 
must have had their cheerful side. “ Many of the complaints 
one meets with are very dreadful, of course ; but sometimes 
the things one is told really are rather absurd.” 


o 


VOYSEY 


Voysey agreed with her : — he had not withdrawn his eye. 

“ People are often so fanciful. And then the way they tell 
one their histories ! ” 

“ It is the foreign hotel. There is something in its air that 
makes people absurdly communicative.” 

The subject, he saw, had seized her. 

“ It is very interesting,” she reflected. 

He paused a moment : all this was not exactly bearing out 
that conjecture of his, and he was a little inclined to make a 
return to the other side. 

“ Undoubtedly,” he said, “ it’s interesting. But don’t you 
find it rather depressing occasionally ? — all this absurdity — 
all this egotism — all this misery ? ” 

It was as if he had offered her a correction. The smile 
began to pass away. “ I did, at first,” she said. 

‘‘ But you find you get used to it ? ” 

The smile passed so completely that he now felt some 
compunction. 

“ No, not in the way you mean. But all that — all that 
you speak of — is not so hard to bear in one of those places 
as it is” — she hesitated a moment — “as it is at home, where 
one’s quite alone with it.” 

He saw that there had been something in his conjecture 
after all. 

“ My sister is a great sufferer,” she added. 

He suspected that indeed he had not been very far wrong. 
But upon the small point of Mr. Detmond, as to whom he 
had been in error, his sympathy yielded to his sense of humour, 
and he acknowledged he was curious still. He could not 
resist the temptation of an inquiry. 

“ Does Mr. Detmond,” he asked, quite alive to the indeli- 
cacy of his motive, “ does Mr. Detmond accompany you on 
your travels ? ” 

He feared Miss Detmond detected the slight intrusion the 


VOYSEY 


I 


irrelevance of the question contained ; but, evidently, she saw 
nothing to resent in it. ‘‘ My father never goes abroad,” she 
said. “ He never goes further than Brighton.” 

Voysey avowed that to many people Brighton was quite far 
enough. After which the conversation flagged, for Miss Det- 
mond, as he feared the case might be with her, did not pass 
from one interest to another very readily. 

The dinner went off very well. Emily’s arrangements had 
been cleverly made : a circumstance the more to her credit as 
this was the first dinner-party she and Arthur had given. It 
had made no small demands upon her courage to arrange for 
so bold an experiment. The flowers were not too abundant ; 
the light was sufficiently protected; it was pleasant from time 
to time to see the dusk gathering in the small strip of garden, 
as he could through the doors that had not been closed. The 
deepening of the shadows into the genial dimness of a summer 
night had a charm when one looked at it from amid the light 
and the colour, from out of the comparative brilliance of the 
little scene inside. The room was too small for the purpose 
— that was the one inconvenience; but something in its air, 
in its hint at a serious conception of hospitality, a reassurance 
in the impressive responsibility of the sideboard, softened the 
discomfort of a conjecture that the passing entertainment was 
an innovation upon its ordinary uses. He remembered the 
impression her management of the child had given him, and 
felt that on the domestic side she was even stronger than he 
had supposed. Arthur was at his best. He was radiant. 
The importance of his position freed the dignity his well- 
turned features gave him from the suspicion of unconscious 
irony that seemed sometimes to be suggested by them : he 
almost claimed respect. Not an opportunity for humour 
escaped him. He was at one with himself, with his guests, 
with the occasion, with all the traditions of hospitality. That 
peculiar look of fulfilment, which we have noticed upon him 


I 12 


VOYSEY 


before at the approach to the dinner-table, he wore with yet 
ampler suggestion to-night. 

Still, little by little, as his difficulties with Miss Detmond 
increased, and were succeeded, when he turned to Miss Atkin- 
son on the other side, by difficulties that were greater still, 
Voysey began to realize that he was bored. And it was a 
boredom that steadily deepened until, the ladies having left the 
room, conversation once more momentarily brightened. The 
mental attitude perceptibly expanded. Mr. Holmes, the tall 
man of whom before dinner he had seen nothing but the back, 
passed Voysey a decanter, and alluded to a prominent divorce 
case. 

“ It was rough on the husband,’’ he said. 

Voysey confessed that he had not followed the proceedings. 
Mr. Holmes then offered a sketch of the evidence that had 
been given, while Voysey lighted a cigarette. 

“ The husband seems to have been a good sort of fellow,” 
Mr. Holmes concluded. 

Voysey expressed his interest. 

Arthur, too, had followed the proceedings. “There must 
be something hopelessly wrong about a woman who does a 
thing like that,” he almost warmly proclaimed. “ She really 
must be a thoroughly bad lot.” 

“ It is not very uncommon,” Mr. Holmes submitted. 

“ Oh, I don’t know,” Arthur demurred. “ I don’t think 
that sort of thing is very common in England. Across the 
Channel, I suppose, there is a good deal of it.” 

Voysey’s eye had been caught by Dore’s Dream of Pilate's 
Wife on the wall opposite, and, as far as the shadow that 
covered the picture permitted, he was observing the peculiar 
drawing of the stairs. And the man — what was his name ? 
—/was he different from other men, do you suppose ? Y 
' Arthur laughed. “ Oh, you’re cynical, Voysey,” he said. 

Voysey explained that his cynfeism was not very abstruse. 


VOYSEY 


113 

‘‘ One man’s very like another, I suspect,” said Mr. Holmes, 
“ when there’s a woman in the case.” 

“ But if there is a difference, surely her being married brings 
it out ? If a man doesn’t draw the line at adultery ” 

“ Oh, well, as for drawing the line ! ” Voysey reflected. 
“ It’s not often so deliberate as that.” 

“It’s mostly a question of being tempted,” Mr. Holmes 
roundly declared. “ It’s nearly all that.” 

Arthur’s humour came to his rescue. “You’re as bad as 
Voysey, Holmes,” he said. “Anyhow, I suppose even you 
wouldn’t defend the woman, Voysey? You wouldn’t go so 
far as that ? ” 

Voysey was a good deal amused. “ Heaven forbid that one 
should defend either the man or the woman,” he assured 
Arthur. “ I only mean that one is a little distrustful of theo- 
ries of exceptional depraviy^. ^Even in the case of women, I 
suspect those who do these things are sometimes rather too 
much like other women to be accounted for too summarily.’^ 

“ I doubt whether now-a-days we are always summary 
enough,” Mr. Atlanson interposed. 

“ I think our distinctions are not often too fine,” Voysey 
said. 

“Well,” summed up Arthur, humorously, “let us be thank- 
ful our wives are other women ! Shall we — you have finished 
your cigarette, Voysey? — shall we join the ladies in the 
drawing-room ? ” 

“ And we, I suppose, are other men \j^ Mr. Holmes 
suggested. 

“ Ah, let us be modest,” Voysey said. 

In the drawing-room conversation again lost something of 
its brightness. Dinner had induced a sense of well-being that 
tended to promote a pleasant relaxation of effort, a tolerance 
of the smaller observation. The tie of a common enjoyment 
had drawn people together; they were now well enough 


I 


VOYSEY 


114 

acquainted to let observations take their chance. It was only 
Mrs. Atkinson who still kept hurrying on : her tones, across 
the murmur of modulated voices, had the aggressive unceas- 
ingness of a mechanical instrument at a fair. For a moment 
or two her voice might be drowned by a general rise in the 
volume of talk, but, at every lull, it burst forth again with 
the rush of a triumphant swell. For a few minutes, while 
her eldest daughter played Tschaikowsky’s Chanson Triste^ 
she ceased ; but Mr. Holmes’s voice, which was robust, was 
a provocation to her, and before his song was half over, her 
voice had begun to compete with him. 

Voysey, whose conversational efforts had not been very 
strenuous for some little time, who indeed had taken things 
easily since his first exertions for Miss Detmond, was quite 
willing to yield to the prevailing influences. Mr. Holmes, 
who appeared to have a liking for him, drew him into a little 
triangular conversation, of which, if one may so put it, the 
younger Miss Atkinson was the base. It was an easy arrange- 
ment, that, as the preference of the young lady rested upon 
Mr. Holmes, left Voysey some measure of freedom. But as 
the evening wore on, he was conscious of a growing feeling 
of discomfort. He had had little opportunity of talking to 
Emily at dinner ; he had been separated from her by a couple 
of places, and had had to meet the nearer claims of Miss Det- 
mond. At the moment of his coming into the drawing-room 
there had been no place beside her, and he had taken the place 
that had seemed to be offered to him near Miss Atkinson. 
Voysey, however, had some facility in managing the small 
manoeuvres of the drawing-room, and if, as the minutes went 
by, he remained by Miss Atkinson’s side, he knew himself 
too well not to have to admit that it was because he was 
avoiding Mrs. Detmond. 

The fact that he was doing so foolish a thing was irritating 
to him, and the consciousness of the feeling of reluctance from 


VOYSEY 


115 

which he was doing it was even more irritating still. He had 
felt all the evening a large want of point in his being there. 
The demands made upon him had been too heavy ; his humour 
had failed to keep his spirits afloat on the waste of these waters 
of banalite. He felt a desire for escape, and for an escape 
that should be definite and final. And it was the thought of 
how little an approach to Emily was likely to further this wish 
that made him reluctant to join her. It was, in fact, just this 
that he found so irritating : the conviction that any talk he 
might have with her would tend to deepen his committal. 
All the evening he had felt she was waiting; he was sure she 
was possessed by some kind of expectation ; and what gave 
the deepest discomfort to his annoyance was a doubt of him- 
self — a suspicion that there might possibly be a sense (he 
abstained from defining it) in which he himself was expectant. 

The evening wore on : when the party at last broke up 
there was a certain suddenness in the dispersal. Mr. Holmes 
was the first to leave; a few minutes later, Mrs. Atkinson, 
under the plea of a particular train, excused the withdrawal 
of her daughters and her husband, and Miss Detmond, re- 
minded of the hour by Mrs. Atkinson, used the same plea — 
but with additional force owing to the distance to Hampstead 
— for the departure of her father and herself. Arthur, with 
hospitable energy, accompanied his male guests to the hall ; 
he went with his uncle, and Mr. Detmond, who would not be 
at the office next day, detained him upon a point of business. 
Voysey and Emily remained in the drawing-room alone. 

A moment before she had stepped into the hall to see 
whether Ellen was at hand to attend to Miss Detmond ; on 
her way back she turned down a lamp (the smoke was black- 
ening the chimney) which had been set for the occasion on 
the cabinet that filled a handsome place near the door; she 
was now standing in front of the flowers in the grate. The 
light of the shaded candles on the chimney-piece behind her 


VOYSEY 


1 16 

fell on the whiteness of her shoulders, and the gold of a neck- 
lace she was wearing made a vivid reflection in the mirror 
below the shadowy outline of her head. The light of the 
shaded lamp on the small table by which Voysey himself was 
standing caught the lower part of her dress. Otherwise her 
face and person were covered by the general obscurity of the 
room, where the only crude points of brightness were those 
of the candles of the piano, which Voysey felt an irritable 
desire to put out. The aspect of the room had changed : 
something in its disorder, an expressiveness in the position 
of the chairs that was almost like a continuance of the con- 
versation, all the power of evocation in trifles — all these 
small things, far from brilliant as the little comedy had been, 
gave the scene a touch of the melancholy of the fallen cur- 
tain, of the sadness of the lowered lights. The door was 
ajar, and the air that passed in, quickening the warm breath 
from the window, drew a wave of sweetness from the flowers. 

Voysey felt as he looked at her, as she stood there before 
him, her hands playing freely, almost coquettishly, with the 
fan she was holding in front of her, that the moment was 
eminently hers. She was at no disadvantage this time : 
she was in no sense out of her element. The emotional 
side of her was clearly uppermost (her excitement was 
only too evident), but, instead of its accustomed immobility, 
her face had a look of interest, of intelligence, of alertness 
even, that seemed to him to strike a new note of intimacy. 
And Voysey, seeing this alertness, and conscious that his mood 
just at that moment was not the happiest for doing battle with 
emotions, hoped he might infer that the scene to follow would 
be played with a lighter touch. To his comfort and relief 
this expectation was confirmed by her smile, her tone, by the 
very irrelevance of the question itself as she asked — 

“ How did you like him ? ” 

‘‘ Him ? Whom ? ” he inquired. “ Mr. Detmond ? ” 


VOYSEY 


117 


“ Mr. Holmes.’’ 

Voysey laughed. ‘‘ Oh, he’s a man with some sense of fun 
in him.” 

“ His people live near us at home,” she went on. “ They 
have a large place there. Mr. Holmes’s father made his 
money out in Australia, sheep-farming or something, I think. 
He’s a gentleman,” she added. “ It was through them we 
came to know my husband. He was staying with them.” 

Voysey expressed his sense of what he felt Arthur’s obliga- 
tion to Mr. Holmes must be. 

“ Mr. Holmes, too, used to be a great deal at our house at 
one time,” she observed. 

“ Ah,” Voysey said. He did not quite see the drift of 
these reminiscences, nor the significance of the interest it was 
clear she wished him to understand attached to them. But, 
suddenly, looking at her again, he divined the significance. 

“ Mr. Holmes is not such a good fellow,” he exclaimed, 
impetuously, letting his thought leap into speech. 

“ I suppose it would have come to much the same thing,” 
she said. 

Her answer depressed him. 

‘‘ It depends upon us a good deal, doesn’t it, what things 
come to ? ” he asked. 

She stepped forward and picked up a rose from the table 
near which Voysey was standing. The air he felt was grow- 
ing heavier. ‘‘ I think it depends upon other people too,” she 
demurred. 

She replaced the rose on the table. 

At that moment Arthur’s laugh came from the hall — a 
laugh genial, wholesome, facile — a laugh lightly provoked by 
the play of humorous gleams upon the surface. The pleasant 
sound conveyed a suggestion of the mental freedom Voysey 
felt he himself was so sadly without. “ Ah,” he sighed, “ it’s 
a good thing to have a sense of humour.” 


Ii8 


VOYSEY 


Emily moved to the window. A train of the District Rail- 
way was passing up the embankment, and the lights in the 
carriages, as seen through the diamond panes that the lamp- 
light of the room obscured with some kind of reflection, made 
a confused vivid line of brightness. She did not speak for a 
moment or two. He could hear the click of the signal when 
the train had gone by, as the green light changed to a red 
one. 

“ Were you great friends at college ? ’’ she asked, without 
turning from the window. 

Great friends? Well, no, hardly that, perhaps. We 
were acquaintances, I suppose. One has not many great 
friends, you know.’’ 

“ I thought not,” she said. 

He felt inclined to say a word for their relations, but noth- 
ing happy, nothing that had any show of truth in it, would do 
him the service of occurring to him. It had, in truth, been 
but the merest of acquaintances. Suddenly she turned from 
the window. “You really know what I mean,” she said. 

“Ah, my dear Mrs. Detmond,” he exclaimed, “don’t say 
that ! It is just what I don’t want to know ! ” 

“You do,” she insisted. “You understood that first after- 
noon.” 

“ And if I do understand, what possible good is it ? ” he 
cried. 

She turned back to the window. To his discomfort, to his 
acute distress, he saw her let her fan drop upon the sofa and 
take out her pocket-handkerchief. Her tall figure, covered 
by the shadow, as she stood with her face turned to the dark- 
ness, appeared to him infinitely pitiable. It was little use to 
feel, as he felt, that the position was meaningless, futile, 
absurd — when it was its very futility that touched him. He 
moved from the small table to the fire-place, and looked at 
the flowers. 


VOYSEY 


119 

“ If there really were anything one could do,” he was be- 
ginning. 

“ But there is — there is something you can do,” she 
exclaimed. 

‘‘Tell me what it is.” 

“It is doing something if you just understand.” 

“ Ah, yes; but doing the wise thing, is it ? ” 

The question remained upon the air. Arthur, having 
closed the door upon Mr. Detmond and his daughter, came 
into the drawing-room, where Voysey, to save things from 
the appearance of a scene, responded as far as he could to his 
cordiality. But the question returned to him as soon as he 
was once more alone upon the Green — the Green that was 
now blessed with the gracious boon of the darkness under 
the reflection of the lights of the immeasurable city. 


VII 


It was on a day early in July that Nell, who since the end 
of term had been staying with a friend near Cromer, came 
home for the long Vacation. She was still a little tired from 
her work ; the weight of the atmosphere of strenuousness in 
which she had lived still lay on the wings of her spirit ; but 
she had brought with her a curiosity, a largeness of expecta- 
tion, a belief in the capacity of the world to afford the endless 
experiences to intelligent young women, that proved excellent 
in their effect upon the spirits of the friends who were waiting 
for her in Harley Street. To Miss Voysey, who, as we know, 
was not without her little curiosities too, her coming meant 
nothing less than a general quickening of interests j for hav- 
ing in the days of her youth rather missed the exploits and 
discoveries of her own generation, she sometimes found an 
odd stimulus in following the conclusions of the young people 
of Nell’s. To Voysey her coming meant several things — 
one of them, certainly, being the chance for some talks of a 
kind he liked. 

“ I want to do a lot of things, Bertie,” she said to him on 
the day of their meeting. “ There are a whole heap of places 
I want to go to.” 

“ The Queen’s Hall, the Academy . . . . ? ” 

“Yes — why shouldn’t I? And I want to do some thea- 
tres. And you must invite some interesting people. I want 
to hear about things.” 

“ Don’t you hear a good deal at Cambridge ? ” 

120 


VOYSEY 


I2I 


“ It’s different : it’s only second-hand up there, so to speak.” 

“Well, we will set to work,’’ he said. “We will give 
ourselves up to the amusements that pass for ministering to 
the needs of the spirit.” 

“ And we must take aunt with us sometimes. She loves 
going to things so.” 

“Aunt is almost as fresh as you are, Nell.” 

The girl demurred. “ Am I fresh ? I am generally sup- 
posed to be rather old. One doesn’t feel very fresh, anyhow, 
after one has been doing seven hours a day.” 

He looked at her, and his clever face had its whimsical 
expression of amusement — looked at the girl’s tall figure that 
had fulfilled what, years before, to the sensitive judgment of 
her grandmother, had seemed the promise of an almost in- 
delicate robustness of development. Nell understood the look 
and checked him. “ I know what you are going to say, 
Bertie. Now don’t ! . . . . One begins to feel quite an- 
cient,” she went on. “ I shall be in my third year next term, 
you know ! ” 

“ Not too ancient, I hope, Nell, to be able still to drive 
some of our ghosts away for us. They have been about here 
a good deal while you have been away.” 

“Oh, don’t let them, Bertie!” she cried. “We don’t 
want them. Now come : you mustn’t be sad,” she pleaded. 

“ Oh no, we are not going to be sad,” he laughed. “ We 
have too much to look forward to . . . our theatres, the 
Academy. It is they that are sad, poor things I ” 

And so in a discriminating leisurely way, with that happy 
freedom from the need to seek cheap conveniences which the 
well-rewarded science of Dr. Voysey had secured for them, 
they set to work, Voysey and Nell, and drew their draft upon 
the wonders of London, just then at its most wonderful mo- 
ment. It was the moment when the great blundering world, 
for all the superb confusion of its appreciations, was somehow 


122 


VOYSEY 


getting hold of its best : when, by those who knew where to 
look for them, fine things were to be had upon nearly all the 
stages, from the literal boards of the old courtly, costly amuse- 
ment of the opera, to any choice social opportunity you please. 
It was a variable English July, and with sunny days, when 
the mist in the park made delicate distances in the spaces 
between the summer trees, came sombre days when the traffic 
in the grey streets, under the grey sky, had its look of mo- 
notonous necessity. But for Nell, on grey days or sunny, 
whether the pavements were white with the hot brightness 
of summer, or the cold light gave the green places their shade 
of pensive town melancholy, the interest was always vivid : 
from the crowded rooms, from the jostling galleries, from the 
bewilderment of the streets, she gathered an immense impres- 
sion of life, of multiplied activity, of boundless possibilities of 
experience. Through her eagerness, her curiosity, her respon- 
siveness, ran a guiding thread of discrimination, an instinct of 
intelligent reserve ; from amid the throng of things seen and 
heard and experienced, from amid the multitude of her impres- 
sions so different in their values, there were things, as there 
were times, which detached themselves : talks in rooms grown 
momentarily quiet, when the murmur of the city, heard 
through the open window, made a significant accompaniment 
to the question ; lingering notes of wonderful movements, 
memories of colour from the galleries, moments at the play 
when pity and fear came near to working their old purification 
in spite of a whole evening’s absurdities ; twilight glimpses of 
London as the hansom rolled over the dry wood pavement, 
and returns at night through the serpent-like lines of the gas- 
lamps, past the teeming pavements beneath the darkened 
houses, to be followed by intimate talks in the cool, dim 
drawing-room, where the smell of the flowers came from the 
balcony, and the small copper lamp on the side-table left long 
stretches of shadow, through which the girl’s imagination still 


VOYSEY 


1^3 

saw the pathos of some beautiful gesture or heard the swell 
of some beautiful voice. 

For Voysey, for whom these gaieties had not quite the same 
freshness, and upon whose good-nature the more popular of 
their adventures occasionally drew, there was a constant inter- 
est in observing Nell’s good faith, the wonderful sincerity of 
her attitude towards all things ministering to the spirit. In 
the things that in her case did so minister there was an extreme 
miscellaneousness that held him wondering at times ; he was 
often in doubt as to what she accepted as mere amusement 
(and, happily, she could be very much amused), and what she 
raised to the value of an experience — for she had experiences 
that had the value almost of little acts of worship. Books, 
plays, pictures, concerts, social occasions of various kinds, she 
took them all with a belief in the importance of what she was 
to get from them, which often provoked his humour. The 
essence of the pleasure of his observation was perhaps a fine 
kind of irony : the world to him appeared a very old place, 
but, in her sense of the newness of her opportunities, Nell 
seemed to have a feeling that if the world itself was not some- 
how new, at least it was turning over a new leaf, starting on 
a course of better behaviour, for her benefit and that of all 
intelligent young girls. She appeared to feel that things were 
changing very fast, and changing, invariably, for the better. 

Among the gaieties always to be had, one for which she was 
seldom disinclined, was the accessible amusement of the park. 
When the weather was warm enough — how rarely it was ! — 
for one to be able to sit in comfort out-of-doors in a thin 
summer dress, to take one of the green chairs under the trees 
and observe the rich possibilities of human deportment, seemed 
to her a thing it was pleasant to do. And so one radiant day, 
after a call upon some people in Chesham Street, she proposed 
that, instead of going on to pay another call, they should cross 
Knightsbridge and turn into the park. 


124 


VOYSEY 


“I can’t stand any more of it,” she said. “That dreadful 
girl has been too much for me.” 

“ Miss Beauchamp doesn’t accept the new ideas ? ” 

“She doesn’t understand them. She seems to think that 
because one is not a slave to conventionality one wants to do 
something horrid.” 

“ Oh,” he said. “ Still her manner’s very good. I am not 
sure, after all, I am not tempted at times to say a word for 
the old restrictions.” 

“ You, Bertie ! ” 

“ Oh, I don’t know. They gave us manner.” 

“ I should be very sorry to lose as much by them as Miss 
Beauchamp loses,” Nell said. 

“ The larger life ! ” 

“ All the interesting things she loses ! ” 

“ At least she runs fewer risks. There are fewer things for 
her to come to the end of. She expects less.” 

“ But why should one be afraid to expect ? ” the girl ex- 
claimed. 

“ Ah, why indeed ! With this wonderful, inexhaustible 
world ! ” 

“ I am not afraid,” Nell declared. 

“ Brave girl ! ” 

“I don’t believe,” she cried, “one will ever come to the 
end of anything ! ” 

He laughed. “ Not even to the end of the park ! ” 

They passed through Albert Gate, and having crossed the 
drive at a favourable moment, strolled eastwards down the 
long line of green chairs. The summer afternoon was rich in 
brightness, and though the season had lost something of its 
bloom (it wanted but a week to the end of July), the green 
chairs had many occupants, and in the stream of strollers 
within the railings Voysey recognized one or two of his 
acquaintances, young men as finished and effective as himself. 


VOYSEY 


125 


sunburnt, leisurely, incurious, in frock-coats with skirts of a 
liberal flow that in itself was suggestive of easy saunterings. 
It was not until they had gone some way and were nearing 
the corner that he and Nell, seizing a sudden opportunity, 
found themselves also at rest among the sitters. 

“ This is splendid,’’ Nell said. “ The satisfaction of a front 
row is great.” 

“ Miss Beauchamp would prefer a carriage.” 

‘‘ Oh, Miss Beauchamp ! ” she echoed. “ She spends her 
life in a carriage.” 

“ She seldom relapses, I expect. She is a young woman 
with a fine air of sustained avoidances.” 

“ Then I pity her, poor thing ! ” Nell declared. “ It is 
great fun to relapse.” 

“ Oh,” he murmured, as he crossed his legs and made him- 
self comfortable, ‘‘ such relapses as yours ! ” 

Though the scene had not quite the air of gay expectation 
of some happy occasions, of the days when the passing of an 
unlimited monarch, or the fez of a prince of some dusky, far- 
off, picturesque, improbable people, gives it an additional flash 
of momentary brilliance, it showed all its typical features. It 
had at least its bright look of life taken lightly, of wealth, 
of ease, of leisure, of immunity from the tarnish of material 
occupations, of a temporary relaxation of effort. It had a 
gaiety, though a gaiety, of course, that was never reckless — 
it was a pleasure that was finely legitimate ; the burden of an 
official sanction weighed upon it all, it was as if a conscious 
gratitude for the social recognition of the indulgence chastened 
and restrained all the assemblage. And certainly the spirit of 
the scene, whatever else it might be, was not an exclusive 
spirit : the park, like the peerage, is hospitable, it is not narrow 
in its qualifications ; horses and carriages of all types and 
qualities went by in the four lines of the drive ; after the 
princely roll of a private carriage would come the poor dis- 


26 


VOYSEY 


guised jog-trot of the hired, with the meagre pretence of its 
appointments and its almost pathetic want of high polish ; the 
people who were sitting under the trees near Voysey and Nell 
came mostly from the country or the suburbs ; the girl in the 
next chair to Voysey’s held in her lap a pale blue Academy 
catalogue. Pleasure might have much to say to the occasion, 
but obligations, domestic and hygienic, were not very difficult 
to recognize: there were ladies who were taking their children 
for a drive, and old ladies who were taking the air. Now and 
then there might roll by a being who seemed a little too fair 
and bright; but only a shrewd experience would classify these 
exceptional radiances. 

Still, whatever its limitations as an occasion for amusement, 
for gaiety, for pleasure, the scene had its movement, its variety, 
its life, and the sun drew inspiriting effects from the colours of 
dresses, from the panels of carriages, the metal of harness, the 
bright points that told upon the sober liveries from the blithe, 
leafy fulness of the summer trees : while a burden of sound 
lay upon the air — the murmur of voices, the roll of the 
vehicles in the drive, the tread of innumerable footsteps on 
the gravel, the booming from the streets without, where the 
world’s business went on still, and the labouring traffic kept its 
prosaic purposes. And Voysey, with whom for once familiarity 
dulled observation, took the scene in its wide generality, con- 
scious of little more than its vaguer suggestions. It was his 
way to let a crowd obliterate its details and yield his imagina- 
tion an impression of its spirit, to try to pass into and lose 
himself in which was a solace to his sense of detachment. A 
large gathering had the appeal for him of a kind of unconscious 
solution, for at times it seemed to him that in reality our only 
solutions are those that are habitual or unconscious. This 
afternoon, soothed by the warmth, by his rest, by the play of 
the genial light upon the gay surfaces before him, he felt a 
tenderness for this presentable leisured humanity, for the con- 


VOYSEY 


127 


ditions that had favoured and fostered it ; he enjoyed, with 
a malicious and cynical amusement, its indifference to the 
heavy-handed people who had designs upon it, while for the 
moment the sensuous side of him responded to its untroubled 
acceptance of the pleasantness of this transitory life. 

For the moment, for once, life looked abundantly pleasant, 
and it came home to him once again that no solution would 
satisfy him permanently that omitted the attraction of the 
things of the senses. Indeed his mood just then was not 
one for omissions : rather there was upon him a passing 
fancy for filling life’s cup to the brim. His senses were 
making a very liberal response to his interpretation of the 
spirit of the scene. And it was this moment that his imagi- 
nation, prompted by the chance resemblance of a face he 
noticed in a carriage, chose for a review of an experience of 
his own into which some element of emotion had passed. A 
lady, in a mail-phaeton that had drawn up by the railings, with 
the alert little groom standing, with arms crossed, on duty at 
the pole, was watching the strollers before the chairs with an 
unheeding impassivity of expression that reminded him curi- 
ously of Mrs. Detmond. Her expression and her attitude 
suggested a detachment from her companion — a man with a 
tanned, handsome face, who was amusing himself by lightly 
tickling his horses with the whip, and to whom she had not 
spoken since Voysey had noticed them — that sensibly deep- 
ened the resemblance. She had an air of distinction that 
Emily had not : but if her expression meant as much as he 
fancied it did, she was a woman too to whom life had not 
given everything. Voysey moved on his chair a little, adjust- 
ing his thoughts, as it were, to a new focus. . . . What, ' 
really, was the secret of his interest in her — in Mrs. Det- 
mond ? Like other men, he had had his friendships with 
women, his intimacies even, harmless, sympathetic little 
affairs in the English manner : little affairs in which the dry- 


28 


VOYSEY 


ness of mere conversation had been relieved by the conscious- , 
ness of a personal interest, by the assumption, sometimes, that 
the interest might have become something more if the chances 
of life had been different ; his friends, for the most part, had 
been clever women, and though clever women too may have 
their emotions, the intelligence imposes conditions that have 
a chastening effect upon the impulses. He had too much 
lucidity, and too much passion, to take such affairs for more 
than they were worth. He asked too much to be satisfied : 
he could do with little enough to be entertained. It was this 
that made the novelty of his experience with Mrs. Detmond 
— that it was so little a question of entertainment. Emily 
was not a clever woman : whatever might restrain her emo- 
tions, it would not be the influence of the intelligence. He 
had never been guilty of any real insincerity with the others ; 
if he had not given quite so much as had been required of him 
(was any woman ever really satisfied with less than all ?), he 
had always given quite enough to keep up the enjoyment of 
the game : his reservation had only meant that there was one 
sacrifice he was unable to make — the sacrifice of his sense 
of humour. For why, if there was to be no catastrophe, 
should one lose the corriedy vein ? At bottom, in truth, there 
were things he did take seriously : his very sense of humour, 
with its implied recognition of the deficiency, was a tribute 
to the real thing. There was something in him that could 
respond to reality of feeling when he met it, and whatever his 
humour, his experience, his judgment might urge on the other 
side, in that little scene with Mrs. Detmond by the window 
that night after the other guests had gone, he fancied he had 
recognized a sincerity by the absence of which, in his previ- 
ous adventures, his attitude towards them might be explained. 

He moved on his chair again, and turned to Nell. Nell, 
who happened not to be taking the scene in a speculative spirit, 
but to be enjoying its wealth of detail, called his attention to 


VOYSEY 


29 


a sad example of elderly aberration in the person of an old lady 
in a carriage who was youthfully gay in pink. 

‘‘ How dreadful ! ” she said. 

“ Dreadful indeed ! ” he responded. “ What an English 
institution it is,” he added, “ the park ! ” 

“ Pink for old ladies, surely, isn’t especially . . .” 

“ One hopes not. . . . Look at the men. Even the 
smartest belong as much to the country as to London. We 
have all, as it were, the air of our national amusements.” 

“ They are perfect,” Nell said. “ Even the old ones are 
perfect ! ” 

“ Ah, but if they could wear pink, the old ones . . . I ” 

He turned to his reflections again. The whole experience 
presented itself as an experience apart. In that little Bedford 
Park villa he was conscious, not only of the loss of those 
chastening conditions, but of an immense difference in the 
entire atmosphere. The difference was so great that if his 
relations with Emily were to be justified at all, a new point 
of view must be discovered for considering them. And noth- 
ing in the affair astonished him more than his willingness to 
discover this required point of view. He admitted his feelings 
had changed since that evening to which his memory too 
frequently returned. There appeared to be so much he had 
forgiven her : upon so much that had jarred upon him, upon so 
much that had provoked him to take high ground, he found 
he no longer dwelt. It was not the least curious aspect of 
the experience that Emily, towards whom he had assumed an 
attitude of which at last it was his fate to recognize the absurd 
condescension, should be winning an acceptance from him 
he had not given to women his respect for whom had been 
almost entirely without reserve. There was a perversity in 
this that troubled him ; he suspected his imagination of play- 
ing his judgment some trick. There was something in the 
position intelligence failed to render an adequate account of 


K 


VOYSEY 


130 

— and of such positions he was wisely distrustful. Indeed he 
was so conscious of this that his thought made a sudden bound, 
and he found himself humorously inquiring — Was he in 
love with her ? The humour of the idea appealed to him. 
To think that a man who always had asked so very much, 
whose reluctance to add to the complexities of life had been 
so deterrent, whose dread of the irreparable had haunted him 
in the presence of opportunities really not without some rea- 
sonable promise, should be won to the great committal by so 
tangible a provocation as this ! That explanation, too, looked 
improbable, and yet this afternoon, in the enervation to which 
the warmth and the brightness and the general pleasantness 
of things had brought him, he fancied it would not take very 
much to make him understand how this kind of provocation 
may succeed. 

“ My dear Bertie, do look. I think I never saw anything 
quite so extraordinary ! ” 

“ Extraordinary ? — what .? Ah, that woman in the dog- 
cart ! There is a little unnecessary radiance, isn’t there ? ” 

“ She must be an actress.” 

“ Oh, no, actresses dress better than that.” 

“ That’s how they look on the stage.” 

“ I dare say. You can’t have a well-dressed woman on the 
stage. If an actress were only well-dressed, she would look 
dowdy. It’s the fault of the foot-lights. The dresses are part 
of the invariable exaggeration.” 

“ You certainly do see some extraordinary sights in the 
park,” Nell reflected. ‘‘ I am not sure, after all, the men are 
not the best part of it.” 

He laughed. “ And what you see, I fancy, is the best part 
of us,” he added. 

He had no wish to be righteous over-much ; he wished, if 
possible, to keep his sense of proportion : but the possibilities 
he divined in his relations with this disappointed, well-favoured. 


VOYSEY 


3 


emotional young woman made him suspicious of any further 
development. He was too sorry for her to be willing that 
there should be any unnecessary abruptness in the manner of 
closing the episode ; but his interpretation of that little scene 
by the window had convinced him of the wisdom of closing it. 
And it looked as if for once circumstances might come to his 
aid. The week after next Miss Voysey and Nell were to set 
out for a few weeks’ stay in the Engadine : — he himself knew 
Pontresina; neither the place itself, nor the atmosphere of 
conscientious athleticism with which our holiday habits fill 
hotels that have access to mountains, appealed to him in any 
remarkable way ; his own preference was for a more various 
conversation and a warmer scene : still, Nell having been 
urgent for his company, he had promised to take Pontresina 
for a beginning. And here, he hoped, a timely solution was 
offered him. An interval, that would be a long one if, as was 
his present idea, he dropped down by the Maloja into Italy 
and gave the best weeks of the autumn to the lakes, would do 
Emily and himself the good office of softening the vividness 
of these impressions ; things, on his return to London, would 
be different ; the situation, after all, was but lightly developed ; 
they had met but twice since the night of the dinner-party, 
and neither meeting had led to any deeper committal ; such 
an absence would weaken the intimacy by producing a gen- 
eral sense of the distance between them, and he believed it 
unlikely her interest was of a depth to prevent her from 
acquiescing in this kind of indication. 

And so, his reflections in the end were comparatively cheer- 
ful. He was not very fond of heroic measures : in matters 
of art, in a novel or a play, he knew the importance of having 
things brought to a climax ; but he preferred, in the ordinary 
affairs of his personal experience, the easy solutions of common- 
sense. He had an idea that off the stage life as a rule was not 
very dramatic. When, therefore, he rose by and by, with the 


132 


VOYSEY 


other occupants of the chairs, to acknowledge the passing of 
the Princess, he found he was able to take the scene in a not 
less generous spirit than before : he was upon the point of 
making a lively observation to Nell when an occurrence, the 
unexpectedness of which recalled the work of some fine ad- 
juster of circumstances, deterred him with the shock of an 
unwelcome revulsion of feeling. For there, close by, stand- 
ing near the railings, in full admiration of the royal carriage 
with the admonitory policeman and the red head-bands of the 
horses, were two figures to whose identity no reluctance could 
refuse recognition : beneath the lace of her white parasol he 
caught the outline of Emily’s profile, while Arthur’s broad 
geniality was legible even in his back. 

All avoidance was impossible : in another moment there 
was a shaking of hands. A slackness of business, a desire for 
a glimpse of a gay scene of which he felt proud as a national 
achievement, a visit for the purposes of conversation to the 
Academy (Emily was carrying the small square catalogue in 
her hand), made Arthur’s explanation of this — with him, he 
declared — infrequent indulgence : he expressed his pleasure 
at the meeting, which he, too, had not foreseen, with the 
intemperance of his habitual friendliness. They chatted for 
some moments, and might have chatted considerably longer, 
had there been a vacancy among the chairs, or had Nell shown 
a disposition to stroll. But from Nell’s manner Voysey 
divined that a cursory interview would more than satisfy her 
inclination ; and he did not feel it necessary that the meeting 
should be prolonged by him. And so the little incident would 
have been brief and uneventful enough, if, as they were again 
shaking hands, Arthur’s friendly spirit had not moved him to 
a parting proposal. 

“ Come and see us, Voysey,” he said, “ before you set off 
for Switzerland. I shall get home early next week : there’s 
very little doing at the ofiice. Come down some afternoon, 


VOYSEY 


33 


and if you want to do a friendly thing, you’ll stop to 
dinner ! ” 

Emily murmured an endorsement of her husband’s sugges- 
tion ; but Voysey, as he turned to her, realized that her inter- 
est exceeded the obligation of civility. And it was a revelation 
that inspired him with a vigorous impulse to refusal. It im- 
plied, if not a re-opening of the question, a prolonging of a 
situation his strongest feeling as to which was a determined 
desire to have done with it. In the accident of this meeting 
there seemed to be a certain malignity. It was inopportune 
almost to the point of being ominous. And then again com- 
mon-sense prevailed with him : one visit more, after all, was 
a small matter, — Arthur’s presence would be security for 
discretion ; on second thoughts, indeed, the call might be a 
good thing for him ; it would tend to round off the episode, 
as it were, with a smoother finish. His absence by and by 
would be covered by it from the awkward suspicion of a 
withdrawal. And so, passing lightly over the suggestion of 
dinner, he accepted the invitation to call, and promised a 
visit early in the week. 

When their figures had passed into the crowd, and Emily’s 
parasol had ceased to be a distinguishable point upon the 
stream, it occurred to Voysey that Nell was observing him. 
He turned to meet her observation. Her face was largely 
expressive of a troubled endeavour at a conclusion. 

“Well?” he said, to afford her an opportunity for 
relief. 

“ Do you like Mrs. Detmond ? ” she asked. 

“ Yes, I think so,” he answered. “ Why don’t you ? ” 

Nell’s manner suggested the hesitation produced by a choice 
of reasons. 

“ Is she, do you think,” she reflected, “ quite a lady ? ” 

To his surprise — in his intercourse with Nell this kind of 
thing happened so seldom — her question jarred upon him. 


34 


VOYSEY 


He disliked it. And he liked his own tone when he answered 
her as little as he liked her question. 

“ Mrs. Detmond has not Miss Beauchamp's manner," he 
said ; “ but I rather fancied we had agreed that that qualifica- 
tion was not indispensable." 

A little speech, of course, that tended to increase Nell's 
difficulty. 


VIII 


It was the nurse this time who opened the door for him : 
they had reached the gate in the wooden palings at the same 
moment, and Voysey, who had a readiness for small civilities, 
had held the gate back for her, and allowed the perambulator 
to pass before him over the strip of conspicuous tiles. The 
young woman in her white dress and neat black bonnet, taken 
with the look of the child in the perambulator that appeared 
to Voysey of rather a gay and decorative kind (it was painted 
white, and rocked on big, easy, comfortable springs), reminded 
him of Emily’s domestic interests, and at the same time of 
that taste for modern effects of which the villa was so wonder- 
ful an illustration. Almost before he had crossed the thresh- 
old Emily herself appeared; and though he divined that there 
was pleasure in her recognition of him, he noticed that her 
glance, even while they were shaking hands, passed from him 
to the child. She led the way to the drawing-room, and he 
followed her. 

“ My husband has not come home yet,” she said. ‘‘ He 
got home yesterday at three. I don’t know what’s keeping 
him. He said he expected to be home about the same time 
to-day.” 

This apology, implying as it did her recognition of Arthur’s 
claim to a share in the purpose of his visit, tended to diminish 
the discomfort with which Voysey received the announcement 
itself. He was glad that they should keep Arthur as much in 
evidence, as prominently before them, as they could. What 
he did not care for was an implication of the existence of any 

135 


136 


VOYSEY 


little understanding at, so to speak, Arthur’s expense. Emily 
seated herself in her accustomed corner of the sofa, behind 
which the large, finger-like leaves of the palm made a back- 
ground with a kind of exotic touch in it. Voysey for the 
moment remained standing. A yellow-labelled novel on a 
table near the piano had caught his eye ; he stooped and 
glanced at the title, and, still stooping, turned over a page or 
two. Emily watched him. This small informality was not 
unwelcome to her. She enjoyed the ease of the young man’s 
movements, the air he had of dispelling small formalities. To 
her feminine sense the familiar attitude of his stooping figure 
had a sociable look in the room ; she found it easier with him 
to begin again where she had left off than she had found it 
with any one she had hitherto known. Voysey put the book 
straight, and apologizing for his interest by asking her about 
it, took a small chair near the sofa. 

Nothing could have been further from his wishes than any 
attempt at beginning again. He believed in the wisdom of 
letting sleeping dogs lie j and to this end it was his aim to 
abstain from all dangerous vivacities, and at the same time to 
avoid, if he could, a stiffness that would be as suggestive as a 
direct allusion. But these conditions were difficult to fulfil. 
Emily was far from supporting him ; he was conscious that 
his remarks had no considerable interest, and her inattention 
was evidently that of a person who is waiting for something 
better. Her silence was a rejection of his intentions, and, 
with her, silence, as he had found, was a power : there was 
something about her, something in her look, her attitude, her 
person, oppressively expressive of a latent purpose. Her 
mere presence imposed itself upon his will. 

“Next week, I suppose, you and your husband will be 
setting off for Morebay,” he said. “Next week is the great 
week for our exodus from the house of bondage. Won’t you 
be rather glad of a change ? ” 


VOYSEY 


137 


“It is not much of a change. We have been to Morebay 
two or three years. There's nothing to do there.” 

“Ah, that’s just what one wants — a place where there’s 
nothing to do ! ” he exclaimed. “No, I don’t know Morebay, 
but I have heard about it ; I can guess, I fancy, what it’s like. 
It’s a sunny little place, isn’t it? — where you have the win- 
dow open all day, and hear a German band while you are 
getting up in the morning. No, the Engadine is rather dif- 
ferent from that. Pontresina is a place to which people who 
have been doing too much (bishops, and actors, and so on) 
go — to do a great deal more ! And, really, it’s a place where 
one has to do something : it is seldom quite warm enough for 
one to be able to sit very long out-of-doors.” 

“ Do you expect to stay there long ? ” 

“ Long enough, I suppose, for Nell to take me up a moun- 
tain or two. Nell is quite one of those persons who insist 
upon doing too much.” 

“She looks very strong.” 

“ She is not : she was worn out when she came down from 
Cambridge the other day. But life presents itself to her as a 
succession of things to be done. And from Pontresina I 
expect I shall drop down into Italy, and treat myself to a little 
sunshine.” 

“ I hope you will enjoy it,” she said : her tone betrayed a 
suspicion of impatience. 

“Ah, it’s scarcely a question of enjoyment. You see, one 
has to wait somewhere.” 

“ Wait ? ” 

“ Till the dusk gathers early enough for one to come back 
to the London streets.” 

Emily looked at him : in her face, in which the unfolding 
of his plans had been accompanied by a gradual darkening of 
expression, resentment for the moment yielded to wonder. 
She smiled. 


138 


VOYSEY 


“ You are strange,” she said. 

He made a gesture of deprecation. The smile was faint — 
her smiles gave him an impression that they wanted depth ; 
but it seemed like a kind of lessening of the distance : there 
was an allusiveness in it, a sudden recalling of another occa- 
sion it might be, that made the emphasis still more personal. 

“Well, provided one is not called ‘ original !’” he mur- 
mured. 

“ You never seem to care for things much.” 

“ For too many things ! Only too many things ! ” he 
protested. 

She hesitated. She failed in courage for the more intimate 
kind of observation even when the talk had become tolerably 
free. “ There’s something rather sad about you,” she, how- 
ever, managed to tell him. 

He started. For this endorsement of what he believed to 
be a private discovery of Nell’s he was not prepared. 

“ I give you, too, that impression ? ” he exclaimed. Then, 
checking himself, he added more lightly, “ And I try so hard 
to be gay ! No — I am disappointed,” he sighed. 

There was a pause. She changed her position on the sofa. 
Her face darkened again. Voysey, as he looked at her, re- 
newed his feeling that it was when she was silent he was most 
conscious of her presence. She gave him at that moment — 
he expressed it to himself in this way — an intense sense of 
her being there. 

“ I don’t believe,” she began, “ you would have come to 
see us again before you went away if we had not happened to 
meet you in the park that afternoon.” 

He attempted a pleasantry: but the directness of the attack 
oppressed him. 

“ And you don’t know how long you will be away. For 
months, perhaps.” 

“Till the autumn — till the short days,” he said. 


VOYSEY 


139 


“ If you are as fond of the sunshine as that, I wonder you 
don't stay in Italy altogether." 

“ But I am fond of the dusk, you see, too — of the London 
dusk. Piccadilly about half-past four on a November after- 
noon, with the lights across the Green Park twinkling through 
the mist, and the great red glow in the smoky sky — ora little 
later when the coaches come in — that's a moment when it’s 
very fine in its way, Piccadilly.” 

“ I am sure,” she insisted, “ you wouldn’t have come again 
if we had not met you that afternoon.” 

“ Ah, my dear Mrs. Detmond ! ” he protested. 

“ Why wouldn’t you ?” she asked. 

She was pressing him too hard. He saw pretty clearly how 
it must end. Evasion would not be able to save them. 

“ Can I be of any possible use to you ? Didn’t we rather 
decide that night ” 

“ The night you dined here ? ” 

“Yes; didn’t we rather decide that evening — it is my 
impression we did — that there were certain things it would 
be better for us to let alone ? ” 

“ And that was why you wouldn’t have come ? ” 

“ Ah, yes ; but we may easily make too much of it.” 

“ Would you never have come again ? ” 

“ Should I have come to-day in that case ? ” 

She did not answer for a moment or two. His admission, 
he fancied, kept her silent by lending itself to more inferences 
than she was able to deal with. “ I don’t think I said very 
much,” her tone was the tone of apology ; “ that evening, 
I mean. Ah, you don’t know what it is ! ” she added, 
impulsively. 

“Yes; that is just what made our difficulty. I do know. 
At least, you seemed to think I did.” 

“ It is always going on,” she said ; “ it is always going on — 
it is always there. And not having a soul one can mention it 


140 


VOYSEY 


to makes it worse. I think you do understand ; but, you see, 
the moment I spoke to you, you were shocked ! In your 
heart you really take his part. You wouldn’t have come near 
me again if you could have helped it. You are sorry perhaps 
in a sort of way — I believe you are ; but all the time your 
real feeling is that I am wrong. I know it perfectly well. I 
know it as well as if you told me. I shocked you.” 

The hopelessness of it overwhelmed him ; he was filled with 
a kind of desperation. He got up and went to the window, 
and stood for some moments looking at the unstinted bright- 
ness of the summer afternoon, at the belt of shadow the tree 
in the neighbouring garden let fall upon the grass, at the dusty 
emptiness of the roadway, at the serene publicity of the sunny 
uneventful little Green. These familiar things did but renew 
the impression he received from the things within ; her life 
reappeared in them too ; the embankment seemed to his 
imagination like the limit of her whole horizon. He felt at 
that moment as if he were taking the measure of the whole 
field of her chances ; and the narrowness of it was brought 
home to him the more by his acknowledging that there was 
justice in her reproach. He realized that there was a point of 
view from which the course he had meditated — the policy of 
avoidance and flight — must wear a distinctly unhandsome 
look; his solution had covered just half the difficulty — the 
half that concerned himself; he had forgotten to consider, as 
most men in such cases forget, what colour his counsel of 
prudence and wisdom would take to the perception of the 
woman. It was the wretchedness of a position like this 
that, do what one might, it was almost impossible to be 
chivalrous. 

“ If I gave you that impression, it was very stupid of me,” 
he said. “The privilege of being shocked decidedly is not 
one I should claim. And really my feelings do rather suggest, 
if I understand them, a certain humility of attitude.” 


VOYSEY 


41 


The regret his tone expressed tended clearly to soften her. 
‘‘ I don’t see that there was any need for what you intended. 
Why need you have gone away ? What have I said ? ” 

‘‘ Little enough ! But I am afraid it is less a question of 
what one says than ” 

« What ? ” 

“ Than of what one feels, perhaps.” 

“ Do you think that I ” she was beginning. 

“ No, I was thinking rather of myself,” he explained. 

Though he could not see her face from his place by the 
window, he divined from the sound of a movement she made 
that she had seized the meaning of his admission. He was 
intensely conscious that she was looking at him — intensely 
conscious of the direction in which her thought must be mov- 
ing behind the unseen expression of her face. He had a 
feeling that he was losing his hold of something — that the 
weapon to which he trusted was growing unsteady in his hand ; 
and with it a sense of exposure, as if he had dropped some 
defence, some protection, by which he had concealed his 
weakness. 

It was two or three minutes before she spoke. She seemed 
to him to be sitting very still. The sounds that came through 
the open casement of the window were lost to his ear in his 
oppressive sense of the stillness of the room. “ Do you really 
mean that ? ” she murmured. 

If it was her silence he had found most expressive hitherto, 
her voice spoke for her now. And its accent of abandonment 
sounded familiar to him ; his perception that it was inevitable 
he should hear this note had been so clear that it seemed to 
him almost as if he had heard it before. He felt the immi- 
nence of the avowal that must fall from her at the least 
admission he might make. And the very extremity of the 
temptation gave him an impulse to resistance. He turned 
from the window and moved to the sofa ; and, with that just 


142 


VOYSEY 


perceptible sense of relief the minutest action gives in moments 
of extraordinary tension, he quietly offered her his hand. 

“ Good-bye,” he said. 

She took his hand and looked up at him. 

“ Then you are going after all ? ” 

“ In my own interest as well as yours.” 

“ Do you mean that ? ” she asked. 

“ Do you doubt it ? ” 

Her face brightened with a gladness it had never occurred 
to him it could reveal. It was another woman who was 
looking at him. 

“ Then you care ? ” 

Ah, my God, don’t press me,” he murmured. 

‘‘You are not going,” she whispered. 

Whose for that moment of final defeat, of complete sur- 
render, was the greater blame, the needs of this narrative do 
^not require us to determine ; the fact itself is abundant infor- 
mation for our purpose — the fact that in another minute he 
was sitting by her side upon the sofa, happy in their first em- 
brace, paying for the privilege with the widest assurances, 
responding to her demands with a magnificent recklessness of 
committal, while, above him, the palm held out its rewarding 
leaf to confirm his triumph and cover his happiness with its 
inspiring crown. 


IX 


The sky above was clear still ; there was a pearly radiance 
from the lingering light : but within the walls of the small 
strip of garden the shadows had gathered, and there was a 
darkening of the colour of the grass. The glow had gone out 
on the opposite house whose back windows looked down into 
the garden, and its surface, the pointing between the courses 
of the bricks, was covered with a misty greyness. Through 
the doors of the open window a burden of summer evening 
sound, cries in the distance, noises from the street, the voices 
of children at play in a garden two or three doors olF, was 
drifting with a kind of pleasant lulling murmur into the room. 
The lamp was lighted, a yellow glow from its shade falling 
over the cloth, and the glasses and flowers upon the table, but 
there was twilight enough still for gleams to be playing on the 
edges of the pictures, and for a space of whiteness, made by 
a reflection from the window, to appear on the sideboard glass. 
Dinner was over, the servant had left them. Voysey slightly 
pushed back his chair with an unconscious movement of 
relief. 

“ Wouldn’t you like to smoke ? ” Emily suggested. 

She got up and went to the chimney-piece, on which a box 
of Arthur’s cigars stood between one of the candlesticks and 
the large marble clock. She took the box up, and had moved 
towards him, when Voysey hurriedly checked her. 

‘‘ No, please don’t trouble,” he said. “ I have some ciga- 
rettes of my own.” 

She paused. “Won’t you ? ” she asked. 

143 


144 


VOYSEY 


He assured her of his preference for a cigarette. 

She looked at him, — and then stepped back and replaced 
the box upon the chimney-piece. He felt she had divined 
his motive. He saw she had plainly enough from the deep- 
ened glow in her cheek when she returned to her place at the 
table. And he perceived that an indulgence in scruples of 
this kind was not one of the delicacies of the situation. 

Arthur had not returned. He had been obliged to go out 
to Hampstead, his telegram said, where, business still keep- 
ing him, he would dine with the Detmonds, but might be 
expected home early in the evening. Emily had persuaded 
Voysey, who had not left her when the telegram came, to 
make the most of this sudden opportunity, offering Arthur’s 
certain delight at finding him there as an abundant excuse 
for keeping him. The moment had not been one for refusal, 
and Voysey had yielded. 

The delicacies of the position, at present, had not given 
him very much trouble. So much had happened, things had 
moved so uncommonly fast, and the pace had been so finely 
exhilarating, that he was chiefly conscious of a kind of luxu- 
rious bewilderment. He was conscious that for once in his 
life he had let himself go, had made a very clean sweep of 
restraints and hesitations, had pitched overboard a whole cargo 
of customary irons and fetters, had given the spirit of mis- 
chief within him its fling — and for the moment he did not 
regret it. It had made him feel superbly alive. The ship 
was marvellously lighter. The dusk, with the white gleams 
playing in it, the shadowy curtain that draped all the spaces 
beyond the yellow glow of the lamp, the lagging light in the 
sky, the mild noises from the distance, the touch of the cool- 
ing air that came whispering into the burdened stillness of the 
room, gave their privacy an intimate twilight charm which 
was saved by excitement from the sadness of the long light 
evenings of summer. 


VOYSEY 


45 


But if these, or some such admissions, were thronging as it 
were the background of his thoughts, there was much in the 
passing circumstances to encourage the play of a near observa- 
tion. After all, nothing in the experience was more interest- 
ing than just the woman herself. It all seemed in a way to 
come back to her. And, in his observation of Emily, noth- 
ing impressed him so much as the sort of reversal in their 
positions that had taken place in the last few hours. It was 
she now who was most at her ease. He could scarcely accuse 
her of having less conscience than himself, but, clearly, she 
must have a fainter perception of the anomaly. The readi- 
ness with which she had taken to their new relations startled 
him ; in what had passed between them she appeared, as one 
might say, at last to have found herself. Her shyness, her 
diffidence, was gone ; she had the tender playfulness and the 
abandonment of any woman who is in love. The fulness 
and serenity of her happiness seemed to him wonderful in its 
contrast to the conscious defiance of his own revolt. There 
was about her an effect of lightness and freedom and ease ; 
the change happiness had produced had resulted in making 
her more alive, more interesting, more lovable. 

‘‘ I am going to have my cofiee with you,” she was saying, 
the momentary trouble from that untimely little scruple of his 
having passed away, “ unless you prefer to be left in solitary 
state ? ” 

He assured her that solitude in any case must come too 
soon, and that he had no desire to anticipate it. 

“That’s nice of you,” she said. 

“ It is not saying much,” he demurred. 

“ I mean the way you said it,” she told him. 

He smiled. Emily smiled too, and this response of hers, 
in which, as it seemed to him, a wealth of things was taken 
for granted, deepened his sense of the general strangeness of 
his position — the strangeness of finding himself dining in this 

L 


46 


VOYSEY 


unfamiliar little room, in an intimacy that to his humour 
appeared almost connubial,, with a woman with whom but an 
hour or two before his relations had lain entirely on the sur- 
face. He did not quite accept this intimacy ; it troubled him ; 
freely as he had let himself go, freely as he had given himself 
to her, he was conscious of a desire for a point of reserve ; 
he wished to be sure that his judgment was there still for a 
final appeal if needed. 

She leaned forward on the table — a little to one side to 
escape the lamp — and looked in his face. “ Miss Voysey 
calls you Herbert, doesn't she ? ” she asked. 

“ Ah, you noticed it ? " 

“ Does any one call you Bertie ? ” 

“ Only Nell." 

“ Does she call you Bertie ? " 

“ You too prefer that ? " 

“ I should have said once, I think, Herbert suited you best. 
But — ," she was still smiling at him, “ now it’s not quite the 
same thing, is it ? ’’ 

“ It is not, indeed ! ’’ 

“ You are quite different," she said. 

“ You have changed more, I fancy.” 

“ I have ? " 

“ Oh, certainly.” 

“ In what way ? " 

He hesitated. ‘‘ All this doesn’t seem to you very strange, 
does it ? ’’ 

“ Oh, it does. I never thought ” 

“We should dine alone like this ? " 

“Never — in this way.” 

“ The other evening — the night of your party — we seemed 
a good way from it.” 

“ With all those people ! ” 

“The Atkinsons, Mr. Detmond and his daughter ” 


VOYSEY 


47 


“That was long ago, whole ages ago.” 

“Yet we were well on the way even then, I suppose.” 

“ It began from the beginning,” she said. 

“ Almost, it may be.” 

“ Qiiite from the beginning,” she repeated, “ before you 
knew.” 

She was still leaning forward. The light of the lamp 
caught the rings she was wearing; her face was in shadow. 
He was conscious, as he looked at her, that he gained now 
a different impression from her features ; he had a curious 
feeling of their being familiar to him, and at the same time 
a sense of something that was missing, a sense that something 
he was accustomed to see there had quite gone from her face. 
He should have had insight enough, he was inclined to fancy, 
to foresee this change, to know that this really had always 
been the meaning of that uncertain expression in her eyes. 
On the other hand, he noticed one or two small points which 
hitherto had escaped him; the line of her eyebrows was 
straighter than he had imagined it was, and something in the 
peculiar firmness, the heaviness perhaps, of her chin reminded 
him for the first time of some one else. 

He noticed she was wearing the same necklace she had 
worn the night he had dined there, and she, seeing that he 
was looking at her throat, raised her hand to the necklace. 

“ You wore that the other night,” he said. 

“ The night of the party ? ” 

“Yes, the night you stood by the window.” 

Her lip quivered at the allusion with the nervous move- 
ment he had not noticed of late, and he found it reminded 
him unexpectedly of his first impression of her. For the 
instant he saw her again as he had seen her that first Sun- 
day afternoon he had called. And his sense of the differ- 
ence between Then and Now served to deepen the wonder 
of the present very sensibly. 


48 


VOYSEY 


They lingered in the dining-room for some time after the 
servant had brought in the coffee, partly from an unwilling- 
ness to lose the effects of the dusk and the lamplight and all 
that they added by way of intimate charm to their privacy, 
and partly from a modest postponement of the return to the 
drawing-room, with the chance for a nearer approach it would 
offer them. At least, it was some such feeling as this Voysey 
fancied he divined in Emily’s face when she proposed, as she 
left her seat, a turn in the diminutive garden. He threw his 
napkin on the table, and stepped through the window, and 
followed her. 

It was almost dark now : the play of the children in the 
neighbouring garden had ceased, and the sound of their voices 
came no more; the sounds that still hung upon the air seemed 
more remote, less articulate, more suggestive; the house at the 
end of the garden had withdrawn wholly into shadow, a sheen, 
like the light on a depth of black water, just showing where 
the eyes of its windows still watched them. And the sense 
of these unseeing eyes that were watching them, the con- 
sciousness of the immeasurable human presence all around 
them, deepened the romance of their seclusion in this little 
lost corner of shadow; from out of the populous London 
night, from out of the world of lighted crowds and flaring 
streets and sudden returns to darkness and mystery, from out 
of all this distant confused troubled murmur of life, the bur- 
den of a message seemed to come to them — a message of 
passion, of illimitable human desire, of the teeming fecundity 
of the city night. And Voysey, as he paced the diminutive 
grass plot with Emily, found in the warm sound-laden dusk 
an assurance that the influences of summer and of the city 
and of night were to be taken as influences very much on his 
side. 

“This is better than the autumn dusk, isn’t it .? ” she asked : 
“ better than Piccadilly ? ” 


VOYSEY 


49 


He laughed. ‘‘ This is very good,” he said. 

She laid her hand for a moment on his arm, playfully, girl- 
ishly, timidly, but noticing that his eye rose involuntarily to 
the houses, she drew it away. “ It’s too dark for them to 
see,” she said, reproaching him. 

“ Let us go in,” he proposed to her. 

He was forgiven. Without staying to finish their turn to 
the end of the garden, they went back into the house, and 
passed to the drawing-room, where the lamp was in its usual 
place on the small table near the piano, and the glow of the 
familiar evening obscurity lay over the quiet of the room. 
After the pleasantness of the garden, the air, heavy with the 
smell of the flowers, weighed on them, though a casement of 
the window was open. 

Emily turned up the lamp a little ; Voysey went to the 
window. A certain reluctance had come to them ; a hesita- 
tion, born as it were of the very fulness of the opportunity, for 
the moment seemed to keep them apart. Voysey moved from 
the window to the piano, and to the small table on which the 
lamp stood, and on which the novel he had looked at at the 
beginning of his call still lay in the place where he had left it; 
he took the book up — in truth, it was merely Emily he was 
watching. And, on a sudden, happening to turn a little to 
one side, he became aware of a face that was looking at him, 
of eyes, in the shadow, that were following his movements as 
his eyes just now had followed hers. The impression, for a 
second or two, was so vivid as almost to startle him, as almost 
to make him step away ; then, looking closer, he saw that the 
face was the face of a photograph — the photograph of Arthur, 
in the white frame, that had its place among the ornaments on 
the piano. 

The absurdity of the incident amused him ; but the impres- 
sion it left was unpleasant. It had the effect of restoring him 
to a perception of his position : and, beyond that, of making 


VOYSEY 


150 

the position ridiculous. Arthur’s mock heroic countenance 
had always appeared to him as a forcible image of the gro- 
tesque, and the sight of him at that moment conveyed a hu- 
miliation as well as an immense reproach. Voysey’s humour 
revolted ; Arthur was not the man for the part ; it was pre- 
posterous to be imposing indignities upon a man with a face 
like that. Arthur’s old nickname of Caesar occurred to him ; 
he found his wit perversely attempting some pleasantry as to 
the credit of Caesar’s wife. The impression was blurred by 
the passage of tenderness that succeeded when, giving emotion 
its way, he joined Emily on the sofa ; the delight of the nearer 
approach momentarily obliterated reflection j but, by and by, 
even while his arm was about her, even in the abandonment 
of his kisses, he was conscious of something that was gone. 
His abandonment was no longer so complete ; instead of giv- 
ing himself up to the passing moments with entire surrender, 
his thought was beginning to play upon them. Owing to the 
angle at which the photograph stood, Arthur’s face was not 
visible from the sofa; but Voysey felt that it was there. And 
the consciousness of the claim it seemed to be asserting gave 
him a sense of estrangement from her. It gave him a per- 
ception of the world of things that stood between them, of how 
little he really knew of her, of her history, of her past, of what, 
after all, must make nine-tenths of her life — of her relations 
with him. Emotion was yielding to lucidity, to curiosity ; 
through the tenderness of their caresses the remembrance of 
the dreadful intimacy of marriage came to him, and, beside 
that, his intimacy with her, their professions of love, their 
caresses, became superficial, unreal. His thought made a long 
journey from her; it travelled out and away and left her 
behind ; he entered upon the beginning of his return to the 
world of his habitual detachment. And, at the same time, 
even while he pressed her to him and felt her responsive to 
his touch, the miserable sense of estrangement became more 


VOYSEY 


151 

poignant, for he knew that with any other woman, in any other 
circumstances, it would have been pretty much the same, that 
had their love been blessed with every sanction and graced with 
every approval, sooner or later it must have yielded to the 
corrosive quality in his thought, to his incapacity to be satis- 
fied, to what he recognized as his profound inability to be 
happy. ; 

“ WFiy did you marry him ? ” he asked. 

She was not unprepared for the question. “ I don't know,” 
she said, simply. 

‘‘ You didn't care for him ? '' 

She shook her head. 

‘‘ Was it because he loved you ? ” 

“ Partly that, I suppose.'' 

“ And you wanted to be married.'' 

She was silent a moment or two. “ I wanted something to 
happen.'' 

“You were tired of Heckingden, and your — home, perhaps, 
and that sort of thing ? '' 

“ I suppose really there were a lot of little reasons,'' she said. 

“Tell me them.'' 

“ I don't think I can. It is so hard to remember exactly.'' 

“Tell me some of them.'' 

She smiled. “ I liked his name. I thought Emily Det- 
mond sounded pretty.'' 

“ That was one of the ‘ little reasons ' ? '* 

“Yes.” 

“Tell me another.” 

“ I wanted to dress differently.” 

“Ah.” 

“ I was only eighteen.” 

“ I see.” 

“Old things — things older people wear — always suited 
me better.” 


152 


VOYSEY 


“ I understand.” 

« Oh, and there were a lot of things I can’t explain. Every 
one wanted me to marry him.” 

“ You used to talk it over with your friends ? ” 

“ I have never talked things over much.” 

“ But you had friends — girl friends ? ” 

She shook her head. “ No ; very few.” 

“ No old school-fellows ? ” 

“ I went to a horrid school. There was only one girl I 
really made friends with. We used to talk about things some- 
times. But I have always been different to other people. It 
sounds foolish — it is foolish, I suppose — but I have always 
wanted something different to what other people wanted. 
I have always felt that. It makes one feel apart, some- 
how.” 

She looked at him gravely. 

“ No one ever talks about the things one wants to talk 
about, do they ? ” 

“ Now-a-days, I should have thought ” 

“ Not the people I have lived with.” 

“ And so you lived in a world of your own ? ” 

“ You think it silly ? ” 

“To live in a world of one’s own at eighteen? Heaven 
forbid ! That little world is worth all the universe ! ” 

“ You did the same ? ” 

He laughed. “ I am not sure I don’t do it still ! ” 

“You see, one thing was this: there was no one at home 
I was fond of, except my father. He was so funny — and he 
always looked so nice ! I must show you a photograph of 
him. He has a fresh complexion, and white hair, and white 
close-cropped whiskers, and he wears a sharp-pointed collar 
that cuts his chin. As a child, I used to go little walks with 
him in the garden. He went every morning to look at a 
thermometer that hung on a wall near the stables. And he 


VOYSEY 


53 


always said the same things to me. He says the same things 
to every one, I think ; he is so shy. And he used to com- 
plain of his nerves. Mother was horrid to him. But he was 
very kind in his way. It was so funny when I was engaged. 
I had a long talk with him one Sunday afternoon in the kitchen- 
garden. We paced up and down among the gooseberry-bushes, 
out of sight of the house. He had taken a fancy to — to my 
husband, and was so glad to hear I had accepted him. He 
thought I should be happier away from home. My mother 
and I never got on. It has been different since then. We 
have become quite friends. We have had him to stay with 
us here, and I want to get him to come to us again.” 

“ That’s good of you. But what became of the ‘ little 
world ’ when you married ? ” 

“ I don’t know. I suppose it went on.” 

‘‘It has a way of going on! We keep that little world to 
play in sometimes, as the lady in Ibsen kept her dolls.” 

“ I never kept mine; I always hated my dolls I ” 

“That’s curious.” 

“And I had such a lot of them — the nasty, cold, waxy, 
sticky things ! Their glassy eyes always reminded me of a 
dead person’s — and their dangling bulgy legs I When people 
gave me a doll, I used to lock it up in a box. And they were 
always giving them to me.” 

“ What were you fond of then ? — of animals ? — outdoor 
things ? ” 

“ Not very. I suppose it was fancy work. I have got a 
crumpled messy piece of crewel-work, a pink rose with a blotch 
of yellow in the middle, that I did when I was in the nursery. 
It is the only relic I have kept, except a funny old white satin 
bag with knitted blue silk over it that an old lady gave me. I 
used to keep lavender in it. . . . One is always supposed 
to feel so old when one’s married,” she added. “ I didn’t ! ” 
She smiled at him. “ But how funny it is I should be talking 


154 


VOYSEY 


to you like this ! I have never talked to any one else in this 
way.” 

He met the confidence with the acknowledgment expected 
of a lover. “ I wonder you have not made more of outside 
things,” he said. Of music, for instance. It says unsay- 
able things to one as nothing else can.” 

“ I have never cared for it.” 

“ Or books. Books now-a-days seem to say most things.” 

“ I don’t care for those kind of books.” 

“You like something more romantic ? ” 

“ I like the people in books to be nice.” 

They were silent a moment. “ Marriage,” he said, “ ought 
to have been a great romance for you. It is for most women, 
surely ? ” 

“ I don’t know. I didn’t marry for that.” 

“You must have known too much about it, then ? ” 

“ Oh no, I knew no more what marriage is like than a 
child. Not a bit.” 

“ And still the romance was there. Perhaps if you had 
waited ” 

“ I don’t think it would have been any good. One never 
saw anybody at all down there — I mean only the kind of 
people one always sees.” 

“And every one, you say, encouraged you to marry him. 
I suppose the truth is, women seldom marry for love. There 
are a dozen other reasons for your marrying. And yet, 
oh dear me ! how horribly disappointed you are all the 
same ! ” 

“ I don’t know whether it is that. There are other things, 
you see ; things one doesn’t know of.” 

“ But he is good to you ? ” 

The colour came to her cheek. “ Oh, I don’t mean 
that.” 

He was on the edge of another question, but the number 


VOYSEY 


155 


of his questions, it was borne in upon him, had already passed 
the permissible. He only said, “Ah, you poor thing ! ” 

“ Don’t let’s talk any more about it,” she whispered. “ It 
has come now.” 

“ The romance ! ” 

For an answer she nestled against him. 


X 


Though he had little doubt as to the pleasure Arthur 
would show upon finding he had waited for his return, Voy- 
sey, feeling unequal to responding to this pleasure, judged it 
inexpedient that his stay at the villa should be prolonged. It 
was a decision the wisdom of which was recognized by Emily, 
who herself perhaps was reluctant to bring the happiness of 
the evening to what might prove to be an anticlimax. And 
so, after a parting to which, after what already seemed their 
long complicity, it needed some effort to bring them, Voysey 
left her, and made his way back to Harley Street, where the 
usual dignified quiet reigned under the long perspective of the 
gas-lamps. 

He let himself in with his latch-key, and went straight to the 
study, and lighted the lamp on the writing-table that remained 
where it had stood when the room had belonged to his father. 
It occurred to him now, with a certain suddenness, that he was 
thoroughly tired. In the train he had experienced a singular 
detachment from the events he had just passed through ; his 
imagination, his memory, his emotions, or whatever it was that 
might have been expected still to keep his experiences before 
him, had, as it were, gone off duty, and he had so far returned 
to himself as to read with some little attention an evening 
paper he had happened to find on the seat of the carriage. 
It was not by any means that he had forgotten the events he 
had just gone through ; it was rather that he seemed to be 
reserving the consideration of them. And now, when he 
sank into the ample arm-chair with an overwhelming sense 
of bodily fatigue, his imagination only reached the incidents of 

156 


VOYSEY 


57 


the last few hours through the suggestions of his immediate 
surroundings. 

It is probable that Emily would have been not a little sur- 
prised if she had known through what a maze of curious feel- 
ing the thought of her lover roamed towards her. His first, 
his predominant, feeling, as he lay alone in the lamplight, in 
the quiet, looking at the portrait, lightly attributed to Lionardo 
da Vinci, of the Italian nobleman, that hung on the wall above 
the chimney-piece, was one of satisfaction at finding himself 
back there again. Love was good — love with its quickening 
of the pulses and its stirring of the blood, but he was tired, 
and he was glad to be alone again, in possession of himself 
again, in the old atmosphere again, in the lamplight and the 
quiet, with just his old memories about him. He liked to be 
looking at his old friend on the wall again, whose expression 
the shadows made the more troubling and ambiguous : he felt 
the need of a large view of things just then, of a handsome 
escape from banalite, and there was a greeting in the familiar 
face, a certain refuge, as it were, in the thought of the extended 
horizon, of the freedom from small limitations, with which he 
accredited this courtly, cultivated, conscienceless, and, quite pos- 
sibly, criminal, Italian gentleman. He was conscious (so far 
as he was definitely conscious of anything) of an access of 
cynicism, that was partly a reaction from sentiment, partly a 
retreat from the situation, but, by a peculiarity of his thought, 
was, as always in this particular place, cynicism that a sense 
of compassion tempered. The room had always kept for him 
something of the suggestion of a confessional. He had never 
wholly recovered it for secular uses. He felt it still belonged 
in a measure to the lamentable company who had poured, 
day after day, their terrible admissions into the tolerant ear of 
the man of science, that exponent of the prodigious intolerance 
of nature. His feeling for it was not markedly that it was 
a place for repentance — repentance was not the form regret 


158 


VOYSEY 


usually took in his case : but rather that it was a place for 
pity, a place that promoted the exercise of that immense 
capacity for being sorry, which did duty with him for a 
religion, so far as he can be said to have had one. On the 
other hand, it was not a place for the platitudes of pessimism, 
nor for any of the weaker forms of humanitarian sentimentality. 
For if sometimes at night, in the lamplight, in the fallen quiet, 
his imagination would people the shadows with the ghosts 
of that stricken company, there would arise before him at the 
same time the shade of his father, that personality of superb 
virility and power. And to-night, when his son passed to the 
thought of him, it was with a movement of genuine affection 
and sympathy : a movement which his recoil in another 
direction tended, no doubt, to stimulate — his recoil from one 
from whose claim upon him (and this was just the admission 
he was too tired to make) he had already begun to recoil. 

It was an admission from which he was able to move still 
further, when, by and by, through the double doors (he had 
retained the outer swing-door with which the doctor had 
protected his consulting-room) he heard in the hall vague 
sounds of movement that indicated the return of Nell and 
Miss Voysey, who (the obligation might be said to include 
them both) had been spending a dutiful evening with Nell’s 
godmother. Lady Luttrell. 

In a few minutes, Nell joined him. 

“ Here you are, Bertie ! ” she said. 

“Well, Nell, what sort of an evening has it been ?” 

Her, too, he was glad to see again. She was looking her 
best. As a rule, perhaps, she was inclined to look something 
less. The Higher Education is a distraction from the claims 
of an appearance, and Miss Voysey, with whom Nell did 
much of her shopping, though her decisions for herself would 
be fairly wise, was not always happy in the suggestions with 
which she favoured her niece. Still such energy as she could 


VOYSEY 


59 


spare for the matter (she was by no means indifferent), the 
girl devoted to an evening effect ; and to-night, had her success 
been much more modest than it was, there was light enough 
in her strong young face, promise and purpose and youth 
enough in her bright young presence, for Voysey anyhow to 
have fancied she brought a radiance into the shadows, into the 
sinister solitude of the room. 

“ Oh, it was rather nice,” she said. “ I am glad to say 
there were some people there. But Aunt Jane ” (Nell gave 
Lady Luttrell the respectful title of childhood) “ talks of 
coming to Cambridge next term, and that’s rather alarming. 
Aunt Jane makes such a tremendous impression every- 
where.” 

Voysey laughed. “ Whom had you ? — any men ? ” 

“ None that counted. I talked most of the time to a girl 
who was there. We got on splendidly. She was a most 
fascinating creature.” 

“ Oh, our poor sex ! ” 

Nell’s tone changed. “ You look very dismal here, Bertie. 
Is anything the matter ? ” 

She moved to his chair. 

He looked up at her, as she leaned over him. “You are 
not very fond of this room, Nell ? ” 

“ It’s rather creepy : your way of talking about it makes it 
feel rather creepy.” 

“You needn’t be afraid, Nell,” he laughed. ^^They won’t 
come while you are here. You are too many for them ! ” 

“ You absurd old thing, Bertie ! ” 

Nell strayed to the bookshelves on which the doctor’s 
professional library remained still. Voysey, who liked watch- 
ing her movements, followed her, but the difference between 
the brightness of the girl’s presence, and the manifold woes 
that lay in the suggestions of those grim titles, impressed him 
as a curious contrast. 


6o 


VOYSEY 


“ Give me something to drink, Bertie,’’ she pleaded, for 
Nelson had brought in the tray. 

He got up and visited the tray. 

“ And where have you been all the evening ? ” she asked. 

He was busy with the syphon. He kept his answer until 
he had filled the glass. “ I have been with the Detmonds,” 
he said. “At least with Mrs. Detmond. Mr. Detmond was 
out when I called this afternoon, and Mrs. Detmond pressed 
me to stay till he came back. So I dined there.” 

Nell had seated herself near the writing-table. He brought 
her the seltzer-water. “ Have something in it ? ” he suggested. 

Her silence was uncomfortable. To give himself a coun- 
tenance he returned to the tray and poured himself out a little 
whiskey. “ I have made an arrangement, Nell,” he said, “ that 
I am afraid will rather interfere with our plans for next week. 
I am afraid I shan’t be able to go with you and Aunt Maria 
to Pontresina. I may, perhaps, come to you by and by, but 
for the journey, I am sorry to say, you must consider me 
‘oif*.’ You will have no trouble. It is not a difficult journey. 
You know your way. You will sleep of course at Chur as 
we did last year. I have arranged to join the Detmonds at 
Morebay next week.” 

The silence deepened. He turned, and looked at Nell. 
She made no movement. He filled up his glass from the 
syphon, and came to the chimney-piece. 

“ I think we can manage the journey,” she said at last. 
A moment later she added : “ Is Morebay a pretty place ? ” 

He told her the little he knew of it — repeated the informa- 
tion Emily had given him. He talked to avoid the silence ! — 
but the silence occurred again. 

He was distressed by the girl’s disappointment. He felt 
that his defection had a measure of shabbiness in it. His 
absence on the journey was a small matter, a facility in taking 
a ticket being one of the capacities the Higher Education 


VOYSEY 


i6i 

promotes : his regret came from the loss in expeditions at 
Pontresina (expeditions he himself liked better than he allowed) 
he feared his desertion would cost her. And still this, of 
course, was not the real trouble. The real trouble lay in the 
dread — a dread that the oppression of his feelings made the 
more morbid — lest his adventure should have the effect of 
disturbing the serenity of their relations. He saw that Nell had 
her conjecture as to the meaning of his trip to Morebay, and he 
knew, from the opinion she had expressed of Mrs. Detmond, 
how severely her taste must accuse him. In any case, there 
was the reflection that the first demand his new tie made upon 
him was that he should begin to encroach upon the old. It 
was a reflection that increased his tenderness for the old : — 
he revolted. He became more definitely conscious of that 
insidious movement of recoil. 

The talk had lost its ease ; — and a little later Nell wished 
him good-night. At the door, however, she lingered. As 
she glanced back, something in the atmosphere of the room, 
its oppressive stillness, its shadows, something in the dejected 
look of his figure as he leaned upon the chimney-piece, under 
the gaze of the sinister face above him, touched her imagina- 
tion, made her conscious of a reluctance to leave him. Her 
first impression upon finding him there was renewed : she had 
a sense that the air was heavy, somehow, with the warning of 
invisible misfortune. 

She turned back, and went to him. 

“ Bertie,” she said. 

He smiled. 

“ Bertie, can I help you ? ” 

He laughed a little. “Not much, at present, I am afraid, 
Nell : but we shall always be friends, shan’t we ? ” he said. 
“ Always — you and I ? ” 

“ Always, Bertie,” she answered. 

In another moment she had left him. 

M 


62 


VOYSEY 


Then, suddenly, as he stood there alone, by some secret, 
unexpected movement of his thought, memory awoke, and the 
various incidents of the day rushed back on him. The little 
villa in the sunlight, Emily’s figure in the shaded room, their 
stroll in the garden in the twilight, amid the murmurs of the 
peopled dusk, the troubling suggestions of the sound-laden air, 
the promptings of the turbulent city night — their caresses, her 
tenderness, her love, her abandonment to him, all the pleasant- 
ness and pleasures of the evening, its emancipation, its defiance, 
its rebel delights, swept over him, and gave him, as it were, a 
sense of the illumination for a moment of one small vivid patch 
of life. For the moment love awoke, and he returned to her 

— returned with a kind of passionate determination that a good 
thing should be made of it for them both : then the shadows 
gathered again, the present claimed him, the murky associations 
of the room possessed him, its haunting implication of how 
lamentably the evil things of existence prevail over the good 

— its association with those stricken beings for whom his pity 
was so great — with the company of them “ which long for 
life^ but it cometh not ; and dig for it more than for hid 
treasures.” 

He sank once more into the chair, and the cry broke from 
him, 

“ Ah, my God ! ” 

It was a cry of pity — of pity of her, for himself, of pity for 
all perplexed, tired, erring, unhappy beings. 


PART III 


I 

Arthur, who had no objection to a little cheerful publicity, 
who, indeed, rather liked to feel there were people about so 
long as his comfort remained uncompromised, found an hour 
or two on the pier on the mornings when sailing had not 
seemed imperative not the least pleasant of the experiences he 
was able to obtain from Morebay. 

Morebay, as Voysey’s conjecture had surmised, was a sunny, 
inoffensive little place, that, in spite of the presence in August 
of much relaxed and miscellaneous humanity, had escaped 
some of the grosser deterioration of such places. It was to its 
credit, for one thing, that it had abstained from marshalling 
its lodging-houses into a solemn straight line of unlovely grey 
barracks — or, at least, of buildings that would be barracks but 
for their balconies and bow-windows. Its lodging-houses, 
which were bright enough in the sunlight, had the merit for 
the most part of being only two-storied, and of standing in 
independent little rows and terraces behind the small, sunburnt, 
wind-swept stretch of common at one end, and the small, 
pebbly, sunburnt public garden with its tamarisk trees at the 
other, that made a diversion between their own small gardens 
and the sea. The parade, too, was nothing but a walk between 
the common — or the garden — and the beach ; a walk which 
was provided with seats near the tamarisks and rejoiced in an 
occasional glass “ shelter,’’ but was free from anything worse 
than a cluster of automatic-machines that stood opposite the 

163 


164 


VOYSEY 


entrance of the pier. The beach, which began uncomfortably 
with rather a steep slope of shingle, was relieved from the grey- 
ness of its pebbles by the green and white stripes of the bathing- 
machines, and, when the tide was out and the sand below the 
shingle uncovered, was brightened by the gaiety of a child’s 
dress, by the red of a small boy’s cap, or by the brilliance of 
a woman’s parasol. The real felicity of Morebay, however, 
lay in the fact that there was not too much of it, and in there 
being some features of pleasantness beyond. At one end — 
the end of the common — the parade, after an interruption 
from houses that protruded at a certain angle from the town, 
dwindled to a narrow walk effected on the line of sea-wall 
upon which, at a slightly lower level than the walk and 
separated from it by a stone parapet, ran the railway, there 
being only this interval between the red cliffs and the sea; but, 
at the other end, beyond the enclosed strip of common that 
seemed to pass for a garden, the parade led you to the mouth 
of a broad tidal river, whose calm grey expanse gave a fine 
effect of spaciousness to the eye, and invited it to travel past 
the slim forms of yachts lying at anchor beside the fairway, 
past the cluster of masts near some black little wharves and 
the broken river-side frontage behind them, past the row of 
low cottages that shone white among the greenness of the 
opposite shore, to the final line of a low white bridge. Be- 
yond the river the coast was continued in jagged, rather 
theatrical-looking red cliffs, and at the back of the town, 
beyond its narrow but “ improved ” little streets, the hillside, 
soon to become moorland, rose green and gay with the resi- 
dents’ gardens and villas, amid which a white road mounted 
with arduous directness to the moors, with their bracken and 
heather and their groups of lonely pines. 

On the morning we have ventured to choose for the 
purposes of this veracious narrative, Arthur, to whom a desul- 
toriness of mood that had declared itself at breakfast had sug- 


VOYSEY 


165 


gested the postponement of any more active enterprise to the 
afternoon, was sitting on the pier, at the seaward end of this 
deck-like structure, within the shade of the awning which sur- 
rounded the kind of large pepper-box with open sides that 
gave dignity to the efforts of the band. His employments, 
with which the music did not materially interfere, were his 
pipe and the morning paper; his attitude and his costume were 
easy, the later comprising a straw-hat, a blue serge coat, a 
striped shirt with a collar turned down over a loose tie, flannel 
trousers of a certain greyness or smokiness of hue, and — they 
were an invariable accessory of his holiday equipment — field- 
glasses suspended from his shoulder by a strap. Before him — 
he was sitting on the seat running along the outer bulwark 
of the pier, and by leaning back a little could see the waves 
below washing the ironwork among the piles — strolling among 
or occupying the chairs loosely distributed in the neighbour- 
hood of the pepper-box, under the awning which the breeze 
kept in a state of gentle undulation, was a gathering of seaside 
costumes, upon which at times brief flashes of sunlight fell in 
places when the awning gaped at a stronger breath. It was a 
gathering of children in short frocks who climbed on the chairs 
and were troublesome, of old ladies who had brought their 
work, of women with the courage of strange hats, of the 
curious families of country clergymen, of men in flannels, of 
untidy girls in dark skirts and light blouses who sometimes 
carried a blue serge bathing-dress and a towel bound up in a 
bundle by a strap, and carried, nearly always, cheap fiction. 
It was a gathering of people from London, people from the 
country, people from the Midlands, of people who came from 
large towns ; people of the middle class, people for the most 
part who were satisfied if they were given a parade and a pier 
to save them from the monotony of the sea, and the novels of 
a circulating library to help them through a morning with the 
band. And upon this assemblage Arthur, when he glanced 


66 


VOYSEY 


from his paper, looked from under his slightly-tilted straw-hat 
with an eye of tranquil acceptance, with a kind of widely- 
inclusive benevolence beaming on his Roman face. 

Emily was with him, busy with a novel, and when his 
wandering glance was caught by the recognition of a face with 
which during their fortnight at Morebay they had become 
familiar, or any accident occurred that provoked an observation, 
he turned to her and drew her attention from her page. It 
was from the remembrance of a daily incident of considerable 
importance — their midday dinner — that he presently looked 
at his watch. 

“ It is getting late,” he observed. “ We ought to be going. 
I thought he said he was coming to us ? ” 

“ What time is it ? ” Emily asked. 

“ Ten minutes to one.” 

“ We can wait till the band stops, I suppose. I expect he 
will be here directly.” 

A man with a blue cap with a cloth-peak to it, and a tanned 
face and dark beard, a stout man whose figure lost nothing in 
his flannels, joined them, and, after a cursory civility or two 
for Emily, inquired : “ Your friend is not with you this 
morning ? ” 

“ No,” Arthur explained, “ he has gone to bathe. But he 
said he was coming to us afterwards.” 

“ I should have thought,” the stout man suggested, “ he had 
had about enough of the sea.” 

Arthur laughed. “ He has bathed every day since.” 

“Well, he’s a strong swimmer, I suppose, and knew what 
he could do.” 

“No,” Arthur exclaimed, “he’s not. That’s the beauty 
of it ! I don’t believe he has ever swum more than a quarter 
of a mile in his life.” 

The man in the blue cap flicked the ash from the end of 
his cigar. 


VOYSEY 


167 


“ Then it was very plucky of him, that’s all I can say ; ” 
and meditatively, his head a little on one side, he raised the 
cigar to his lips. 

Arthur’s face expressed a confirmation of this opinion that 
showed a handsome appreciation of the exploit. 

Another acquaintance came to them : a man who had been 
sitting near the band with his wife, a person in a white dress 
and a straw-bonnet very gay with large red poppies, who was 
reading a publication of which she concealed the cover. 

“ Have you seen the Morehay Chronicle ? ” he asked address- 
ing Emily. 

“No,” she said. “Is there anything ” 

“ It has a paragraph about your friend.” And he handed 
her the paper to read. 

“ Yes, I saw it this morning,” observed the man who had 
joined them first. 

Emily read the paragraph, and, happening to look down the 
pier as Arthur took the paper from her, added : “ Here comes 
Mr. Voysey, I think.” 

Arthur looked in the same direction. “ Oh yes, that’s 
Voysey,” he said. 

For a moment the sight of him — he was still a little way off, 
on the earlier, the narrow part of the pier, the space on which 
the band played being a kind of lozenge-shaped addition at 
the seaward end — was obstructed by a group of figures that 
just at that point intervened ; then, when he came into view 
again, they saw him pause to look over the bulwark at a boat 
that was passing below, but his leisurely progress was no sooner 
resumed than he discovered the position of Arthur and his 
acquaintances, and passed among the chairs towards them. 
Emily watched him. It occurred to her, as it had occurred 
more than once during their stay at Morebay, that in spite of 
the general relaxation of the place, he had contrived to retain 
something of a well-groomed look. He was wearing an airy. 


68 


VOYSEY 


light suit, a white Tyrolienne hat, a tie so managed as to leave 
an open space at the top of his waistcoat, a collar and wrist- 
bands of a freshness that could bear the light, dark, seasoned 
brown shoes. But her mind was not perplexed by the transi- 
tion to this costume from the formal habiliments of Piccadilly; 
her imagination made an easy passage from the Tyrolienne hat 
and the airy light suit to the ceremonial frock-coat in which 
she had formerly seen him. He was sunburnt ; his hands 
were even browner than his face, and though his movements 
were inclined to be deliberate, deprecatory of needless fatigues, 
his person in this out-of-door world had an air of vigour and 
“ fitness ’’ that made his success on the playground in his youth 
seem not at all improbable. Arthur, who had always, even as 
a boy, been singularly inactive himself, but whose reverence 
for athletic achievement was immense, regarded with consid- 
erable respect Voysey’s modest exploits at college as a runner 
— would recall them, and dwell upon them, and ask about 
them, and treat Voysey, whose interest in “ records ” and scores 
had diminished, as an authority in such matters upon the 
strength of them. 

Voysey at last reached the group, and greeted the men who 
were in conversation with Arthur and his wife. 

“Yes, the water was very nice,” he said, in answer to a 
question from one of them ; “ the tide was just off the shingle. 
What has the band been playing ? ” he asked, turning to Emily. 

“ Read this, Voysey,” Arthur said. 

“ What is it ? ” 

“Just by my finger.” 

Voysey took the paper, and his eye fell on the paragraph. 

“ Ah ! ” he exclaimed ; “ heroics ! ” 

Emily made room for him on the seat beside her. The 
paragraph he read ran as follows : — 

“y/ Gallant Rescue from Drowning, — An accident, which 
pnly the pluck of one of our visitors prevented from having a 


VOYSEY 


169 


fatal termination, occurred olF the end of the pier last Wednes- 
day afternoon. Two young lads, Frederic Williams and Arthur 
Graves, were by themselves in a boat belonging to the father 
of the former, when through carelessness in changing places 
the boat was capsized, and both lads were thrown into the 
water. Williams, it appears, contrived to scramble on to the 
keel of the overturned boat, but the current, which was running 
strong at the time, bore Graves, the younger lad, to some dis- 
tance from his companion, and it was evident that he would 
have been carried away if Mr. Herbert Voysey, who had wit- 
nessed the accident from the landing-stage below the pier, had 
not dived in and swum to his assistance. Mr. Voysey, though 
hampered by his clothes, succeeded in reaching Graves and 
returning with him to the boat, upon which he managed to 
support the boy until help reached the party from the shore. 
Both the lads and their preserver, who resides in London, were 
much exhausted when taken from the water, but it is hoped, 
are not otherwise the worse for their adventure. Mr. Voysey 
is son of the late H. C. Voysey, Esq., M.D., the well-known 
physician of Harley Street.” 

Voysey returned the paper. 

The incident had pleased him. There had been times 
when he had wondered whether an emergency of this kind 
would find him equal to meeting it. His nerves had often 
played him such fantastic tricks when the cause of apprehen- 
sion had been imaginary that he had wondered sometimes how 
really they would serve him at the call of a serious risk. He 
had been haunted by what he had been obliged to admit was 
a doubt as to his physical courage. His courage had but sel- 
dom been tried; once or twice, in Switzerland, he had found 
himself in places that had been nasty for a man who was not 
much of a climber — and he had not liked those places: but 
he could recollect, otherwise, no important experience of peril. 
The boy was the only being whose rescue he had ever been 


70 


VOYSEY 


required to attempt, and the sureness of the impulse upon 
which he had acted, his freedom from all hesitation in making 
the dive, had been a satisfaction to him. The incident was a 
feature in his stay at Morebay he considered it pleasant to 
recall. 

“Well,’’ Arthur said, folding his paper (their acquaintance 
had left them), “ I suppose we ought to be getting back. Our 
woman’s pretty punctual.” 

“Morebay knows when it’s one o’clock,” Voysey as- 
sented. “ There seems to be a general movement towards 
dinner.” 

And they drifted into the stream that was now flowing from 
the pier. 

As the morning had been, so, in its harmony with the ways 
of the place and its spirit, was the afternoon, and so was the 
evening. In the afternoon, after the half-hour or so of inac- 
tivity claimed by a midday dinner, Arthur and Voysey, leaving 
Emily, who was disinclined to much walking, with the nurse 
and the child, had themselves ferried across the river, and 
following the high ground above the cliffs, walked to one of 
the small bays that were among the picturesque incidents of 
the coast. In the evening, after a tea which certain substantial 
additions raised to the designation of “ high,” they took an- 
other stroll on the parade, in the dusk, and had an hour or so 
on the pier in the starlight, with the waves lapping the piles 
below, and the lights of Morebay twinkling under the vague 
background of the hill, whose ridge, where the moors began, 
could just be caught against the sky in the lightness of the 
summer night. When the band had ceased and the stream 
flowed again from the pier, they sauntered back in the dim- 
ness across the common to the particularly lighted window 
that stood for their own dining-room, where, when Emily had 
left them, Voysey and Arthur took to pipes by the open win- 
dow, with the sound of the sea drifting out of the darkness 


VOYSEY 


171 

into the gaslit confinement of the room. Voysey was sharing 
their lodgings, for when, in accordance with their little “ com- 
bination ” of the evening Voysey had dined with her, Emily 
had hinted to her husband that his friend might conceivably 
be induced to join them, she had prompted Arthur to dwell 
upon the convenience of an arrangement of this kind, Voysey 
himself having talked of an hotel. 

Apart from his peculiar relations with both of them, with 
both husband and wife, Voysey, who had always made rather 
a point of avoiding small seaside places, found he was leading 
a curious life. It had been a more tolerable life than he had 
expected. He had a certain capacity for doing nothing — 
nothing, that is, except observe, and draw inferences, more or 
less humorous, from his observation. And in the range of this 
observation it was inevitable that Arthur should be a prominent 
mark, though there was an element in their relations that im- 
posed a limit of delicacy. As their intimacy deepened, the 
strongest impression Voysey gained was that of his perpetual 
boyishness. He had never left school, he had never come 
down from college. The one respect in which he showed, it 
seemed to Voysey, he had really grown up, was the feeling he 
had for money ; he was by no means avaricious, but the City 
had given him the sense, which only grown-up people have, 
of the relative importance of incomes. He talked a great 
deal, he was constantly talking, and his talk never strayed far 
from the interests of the morning paper. He was never tired 
of the popular trial, the weather, ingenious crimes, intelligence 
as to all manner of catastrophes and disasters, “ records’’ of all 
kinds, with the accelerations of steamers and trains, the doings 
of the more prominent actors, about whom he was perpetually 
curious, though disliking the confinement of the theatre, the 
need for sustained attention, the prohibition of his pipe, and 
the interference with his dinner hour, he very seldom went to 
the play j the more conspicuous movements of royalty, which 


72 


VOYSEY 


he was fond of considering in a way of his own with especial 
regard to the weather. 

It was not that these were matters without interest, but a 
want of memory, a want of attention, prevented his being 
well-informed. The impression from his reading was tran- 
sient ; he could seldom give much of an account of what he 
had read five minutes after he had put the paper down. His 
thoughts were errant, miscellaneous, disconnected, uncritical 
— as miscellaneous as our civilization. His information was 
detached, broken up, as it were, into small paragraphs. He 
would dwell upon an isolated item of statistics — as, for in- 
stance, upon the so many millions of eggs this country imports 
year by year. He criticised nothing; he seemed to object to 
very little. In politics he was conservative, in religion ortho- 
dox with the kind of orthodoxy that makes a man a good 
sidesman : his prejudices, his objections were such as naturally 
arose from the opinions he had obtained at school, at college, 
in the City ; there were not many things to which he objected, 
as one might say, on his own account. 

And yet, as Voysey ended by discovering, he really had 
something like a private life — a life, that is, which he did not 
share with the thousands who took his paper. There was the 
sum of the experiences that were simply his own : the people 
he had known, the places he had visited, the books he had 
read. There were his habits, the host of his small fears and 
superstitions. His hearing being slightly defective, he was 
haunted by a dread of deafness, and would become uneasy 
upon any occasion when the person he was with suggested 
listening for a finer sound. His health, though he never 
acknowledged it, was a constant preoccupation with him ; 
admirable as it appeared to be, Voysey divined that he was 
troubled by a secret doubt of it. He was not a man who 
cared to give much time to books, but, in the direction of 
poetry, being liable to moments of sentiment, he had ventured 


VOYSEY 


173 


upon various experiments. At some time or other, it came 
out, he had tried to read Wordsworth, against whose genius 
he cherished a singular resentment. The attempt had greatly 
impressed him ; he had never recovered from his dismay. 
Little disposed as he was to claim an opinion in matters of 
this kind, he could never quite allow that a liking for Words- 
worth might be free from the taint of affectation. He found 
what satisfied him in Campbell, from whose Pleasures of Hope 
he would sometimes quote even to the extent of two or three 
consecutive lines. Out-of-doors he liked listening to a band ; 
and he rather liked his wife to play hymn tunes for a little 
while on Sunday evening after supper. At such times, for ten 
minutes or so, a certain wistfulness of sentiment would possess 
him, his spirit would perform a little act of piety. Something 
within him seemed to respond to the starry depths as he saw 
them through the open window across the smoke of his tobacco, 
and to the associations of the music which revived within him 
that pleasant, dreamy state of thinking about nothing in par- 
ticular that belonged properly to his devotions in church, and 
at the same time gave him a pervading sense of some invisible 
tenderness which came probably from a recollection of his 
childhood with his mother. Perhaps, too, at such times, there 
would come to him some hint at the final silence, some intima- 
tion that a man’s interest in this most interesting world may 
know an unforeseen, an untimely close, some thought of the 
publicity of that last morning paper in which our friends in 
their piety publicly dismiss us to oblivion, for when Emily 
closed the piano the increased cheerfulness of his tone sug- 
gested the comfort of a return to earth. To Voysey, too, the 
closed piano was far from being unwelcome, since the emo- 
tions hymn tunes stirred within him were not invariably 
amiable ; and Emily’s playing was atrocious. 


II 


It was a curious life, and taken superficially as a question 
of so much boating and bathing, so much sauntering on the 
pier and the parade, so much acquiescence in a desultory 
ambling over well-worn topics, for Voysey, who loved the sea, 
and at times could forgive the commonplace, so long, at least, 
as it was cheerful, was not an intolerable life ; but looked 
at below the surface, judged by a different measure, expressed 
in terms of emotion and passion and reason and of the con- 
flict between reason and passions and nerves, it was a life 
of vivid elations and lamentable depressions, of soarings by 
day to sunlit heights, and of nights when the darkness had 
voices, a life of deception, of indignity, of incessant strike, of 
one long incessant exasperation of the senses. 

All his old fears were being realized, all his old misgivings 
fulfilled ; his old conviction that peace, if ever he was to know 
peace, could come only from all too ardent imaginings being 
suppressed, was now abundantly justified. His sins of late 
years had mostly been sins of imagination : in the wantonness 
of early youth he had lived his young man’s life, he had drawn 
upon the opportunities of London, and had had his experi- 
ences like the rest : the period of these aberrations, however, 
had not been a long one, and now, for some years, he had 
walked by the better traditions. It was mainly against the 
temptations of the imagination that the warfare he had carried 
on had been waged. Still, his temperament being what it was, 
it had been a warfare without intermission, and to enable him- 
self to maintain it he had been obliged to take refuge in some 
little excess of precaution. Counsels that might have ap- 

174 


VOYSEY 


75 


peared to another man — a man, that is, with as little inclina- 
tion by nature to asceticism as he had — counsels of perfection, 
seemed to him only counsels of prudence. At all events, it 
was not merely as the result of a lucid and somewhat disillu- 
sioned observation that he had decided that it would be well 
for him to keep his life as little troubled by women as he 
could. And whatever there may have been in this feeling of 
the exaltation that comes usually from this particular recoil, 
now, when the battle had passed from the field of imagination 
to a region of very palpable reality, those old counsels of his 
flamed before him as if written in letters of fire. 

It was not always, however, in this tragic spirit that he took 
this last, and by far the most serious, of his adventures — in 
fact, the only adventure of his that had ever been worthy of 
the name. It was difficult to believe that their nude little 
lodging-house sitting-room, with its hard concessions to human 
necessities, its rugged little chairs, the coldness of its marbles 
and mirrors, could really be the scene of great issues. More- 
bay itself was guiltless of all provocation to adventure ; the 
worst that could be said of it, with its air of the rather obtru- 
sively and obviously domestic, was that the Proprieties there 
were taking a holiday — were forced to unbend a little, poor 
things, and be a little more accommodating than at home : it 
was difficult to believe that the fumes of rank desires would 
not evaporate in the pure sunlight of these long bright summer 
days, be purified by the wholesome cleanness of the bitter salt 
breath of the sea. And yet, in spite of the security implied 
in the commonplaceness of the things about him, the truth 
was that for Voysey the situation had depths ; the sunlight 
had lost its healing power, the companionship of the sea its 
wholesome influence ; his imagination was possessed, troubled, 
haunted, corrupted by the constant image of the woman who 
was loving him with such desperate unwisdom of abandon- 
ment, who held him by the enervation of her presence, the 


176 


VOYSEY 


intensity of her passion, the spell of her tenderness and 
devotion. 

Her devotion was a revelation to him — a revelation of what 
the love of a woman may mean — of how a woman may be 
transformed by love. He had known nothing like the tender- 
ness with which she enveloped him — a tenderness that was 
always on the watch to express itself : that never missed the 
chance of a welcome, a smile, a caress. There were fine in- 
ventions, fine inspirations, in her tenderness, she discovered 
a thousand small ways of enforcing it, that he had never 
imagined in his prevision of love, a seduction he had never 
foreseen nor allowed for. The moment they were alone she 
was his — and making him intensely conscious of all that it 
meant to her to be his. In no one’s life had he ever taken so 
large a place, there had been no one to whom his presence 
had ever meant half so much. It was only as their intimacy 
deepened and she began gradually to disarm his mistrust, it 
was only as, without cherishing any illusion as to the nature 
of her passion, he grew to a perception of how immense the 
transforming power of that passion really was, that he came 
to understand what love meant for her. He saw that it 
meant just everything. It had lighted up the heights and the 
depths for her ; it had revealed deeper places than he had ever 
believed in ; it was in the strength of such a love as this that 
a woman might rise to heights — even to heights touched with 
glory. He was conscious of a profound modification of his 
old opinion of her. He accused himself of having judged her 
superficially — in truth, by the things that didn’t matter. 
There was a sympathetic, an imaginative, an emotional side 
to him, through which he had been brought more than once 
to make returns of this kind upon the judgments he had 
passed on women. And, as the days went by, the enervation 
of her constant presence, of their hourly contact in the con- 
finement of the seaside lodgings, the strangeness of the exist- 


VOYSEY 


177 


ence he was leading, its isolation, the total loss of his 
ordinary atmosphere, of his ordinary associations, combined 
to make his returns of another kind, his returns to his 
reasonable and habitual self, sensibly to diminish in frequency. 
On the other hand, the little incidents of the daily life, the 
world of small familiar things that forms itself out of the life 
together, were making ties between them, were giving them 
interests, were beginning to hold them in the entangling web 
of habit. Associations were gathering about the objects 
around them : the house was hers ; things that belonged to 
her were constantly speaking to him, things she had touched, 
things she had changed in her attempt to diminish that look 
of inhospitable emptiness which gave their sitting-room so 
much the air of a transient occupation. All manner of trifles 
evoked her presence : her novels, the chair that had come to 
be hers, the photograph of the child on the chimney-piece, the 
bit of Liberty stuff' she had thrown over the green billowiness 
of the sofa, the window by which they stood when they 
looked out on the sea. In the same sense all Morebay was 
hers. There was their particular seat on the parade ; and the 
seat, too, on the sea-wall, where, with the moving waters 
lying below them in the dusk, and the lighted trains flashing 
past behind, they had spent the one evening they had had 
alone. And there was always the sea — the sea that haunted 
him like a living presence ; that was with him all day long to 
make an accompaniment to her voice when they were to- 
gether, to recall her when they were apart. He had always 
been good to women, and he did not accept so much from 
her without some attempt at generosity in return. She asked 
about his past, and he found himself revealing things it had 
never occurred to him he would reveal except to the uttermost 
sympathy. She might not understand, but whether she under- 
stood or not she was interested : she listened, and no harm 
seemed to come of it. The outer barriers, the strong de- 


N 


178 


VOYSEY 


fences, of his intelligence and his taste, had been broken 
down, and she was penetrating into the inner places by the 
spell of her presence and her tenderness, and was beginning, 
little by little, to possess them. There were times when he 
was not so sure, after all, that she did not understand a good 
deal. 

“ Ah,” she said to him one day in their sitting-room (he 
had induced Arthur and Emily to take the whole of the small 
house this year), when Arthur had closed the door, “ you had 
just the look, then, Bertie, you used to have.” 

He had a book in his hand, but for some time his eyes had 
rested on the sea. ‘‘ It is something, I suppose, I don’t often 
have now.” 

“ Not as often as you used to,” she told him. 

“ What sort of a look is it ? ” 

“ It’s a look you would never have if ” 

“ Tell me.” 

“We could be always together.” 

“ You’d keep it away ! ” 

Into her face, too, had passed a look with which he had 
grown familiar — that grave, uncertain look whose meaning 
he had been so long in finding out. “ That’s a look I know,” 
he told her. 

“You have never been happy,” she said. 

“ Oh, I don’t know,” he demurred : “ I have done pretty 
well sometimes.” 

“No, you have never been happy.” 

He glanced over the sunny little common at the sea again. 
“ Can you tell ? ” 

“ Should I care if I couldn’t ” she answered. 

They often talked of “being together,” but they never 
talked of the future. She would never let him speak of the 
future. This had surprised him at first, for their relations 
could hardly be regarded as permanent, and his thoughts had 


VOYSEY 


179 


turned to a climax. The situation, with all to which it com- 
mitted them, in a dozen ways was altogether intolerable, and 
sooner or later, he had expected, she would require him, or he 
would be driven, to face the solution which situations like 
theirs suggest. He had expected that one of these days there 
would be talk of their running away. But he had presently 
discovered that whatever her passion for him might give her 
the courage to do, there was one sacrifice it would never 
betray her into making : the sacrifice of the loss of her child. 
There was that limit to her love for him — and it was an 
insuperable limit. It was the consciousness of this, of what 
it would be impossible for her to do for him in the last 
resort, that made her sensitive to allusions to the future, and 
made her cling with passionate intensity to the present, and 
the possession of the maimed delights it was giving them. 

There was this limit to her love j and, as the days went 
by, and she little by little gave up her secrets to him, he real- 
ized it was the only limit. 

They made a curious company, these secrets : it was a 
curious multitude of hopes, fears, superstitions, strange credu- 
lities, wonderful ignorances, crudities, perversities, disappoint- 
ments, deceptions, that lay on the other, the inner side of this 
obviously limited existence. He soon discovered how young 
she was — how much of a child. He saw that she was full 
of a kind of wonder at her own life — wonder that so much 
of what she had been as a girl should remain in her as a wife 
and mother. She had never felt herself to be clothed with 
the dignity of marriage ; she had found in it none of the 
finality she had expected ; it had left her still unformed, in- 
complete, ignorant, still curious, still profoundly expectant. 
It had left her with the old foolish longing she had had all 
through her girlhood, the longing for something to happen. 
Little by little he reconstructed her past. He saw her as a 
child. Childhood is never uneventful — every childhood teems 


i8o 


VOYSEY 


with events ; and her childhood had had its incidents too, to 
which she recurred, and recurred with tenderness, but he 
gathered that she had been a singularly unloving child. Her 
tenderest allusions chilled him. He saw her as a girl, living 
with her dreadful mother (his conception of Mrs. Boulger was 
now vivid), and her shy, oppressed, superannuated, incapable 
father, round whom, too, his imagination played. He saw her 
moving through the friendly, tennis-playing, country neighbour- 
hood, with its numberless maidens, its ineligible young men 
from the university, its irrepressible parsons — moving a shy, 
embarrassed, rather featureless figure, but cherishing all the 
while an inarticulate protest, a rejection of the conditions, an 
unceasing consciousness of difference. She and the tennis- 
playing maidens had never been quite friends. She told him 
she had had very few friends among women, and he divined 
that women had not liked her. And as the meaning of these 
things sank in, and he remembered how intensely emotional 
she really was, it stood out vividly before him that there must 
be a wealth of unlived life in her. He was not only her lover, 
but her first and only friend. He was giving her just what 
she had always wanted — some one who would talk to her 
about little things, respond to her small criticisms of the people 
who passed them on the parade, be interested in her purchases, 
in shop-windows, who would know what she wore, would 
notice things, who would never bring her up abruptly face to 
face with the sudden wall of Arthur’s I don’t agree with 
you,” would never persist in portentous explanations, never 
contend for pitiful little details of fact. She was grateful to 
Voysey for his patience, his tact, his gentleness, his tolerance 
of her small credulities. Her respect for him was immense : 
for his judgment, his knowledge, his varied experience, his 
savoir vivre, his worldly credit. His friendship gained a 
charm for her from all that he seemed to know about women, 
while there was in it, too, the charm — which for a woman 


VOYSEY 


i8i 

is the sovereign charm of a man’s friendship — the charm of 
all that he didn’t know. 

“ I never met any one so observant,” she once told him. 
“Y"ou must have been with women a great deal.” 

“ No I have had a good deal of leisure,” he laughed. 

She was never quite easy when he laughed; when he 
laughed she felt he somehow escaped her. “ Why do you 
laugh ? ” she said. 

The explanation was too difficult. “ The general irony of 
things,” he murmured. 

“You are very unlike most men,” she went on. 

“ Oh, don’t say that. Even our poor sex has its merits.” 

“ Of course you have them. Look at the way you saved 
that horrid little boy the other day ! ” 

“ It was an impulse.” 

“ It was heroic of you.” 

“The Humane Society will give me a medal. And there 
was the paragraph in the newspaper. I shall not miss my 
reward.” 

She looked at him. “ I have never talked to any one as I 
talk to you.” 

“ Ah, I like to hear that.” 

“ I have always told you so.” 

“ I think there is something between us.” 

“ A whole world of things ! ” 

“That’s what I want.” 

“ And more every day.” 

He turned to her. “ I really am some little good to you, 
then? — in small things.” 

“ Ah, Bertie ! ” she cried, — and it was a cry that answered 
him handsomely. 

She never posed, she was wholly free from fictitious emo- 
tions, she was nothing less than modern — modern art and 
literature and music, and the moods and attitudes that go with 


VOYSEY 


182 

them, had left her wholly untouched. Her claims upon exist- 
ence were genuine claims ; and there was one word that cov- 
ered them. Love was her life and religion. He was not only 
her lover and her first and only friend, but she made him her 
fellow-worshipper at the shrine of unhallowed and idolatrous 
mysteries. Her love was strangely without self-reproach, her 
idolatry was altogether conscienceless. Religion had touched 
her as little as music or art. How could a person, he some- 
times wondered, have been to church so often and have lis- 
tened so uncommonly little ! He would use some familiar 
phrase of theology, or quote a still more familiar text, and she 
would show not the faintest sign of recognition. 

And as their intimacy deepened, he perceived that the con- 
sciousness of this limit to her love for him was always more 
or less with her. She was constantly seeking to atone for it. 
It stimulated her passion for being good to him. 

Their opportunities for being alone were rare. Such an 
opportunity came one morning from Arthur’s being obliged 
to stay at home to write letters. There was the prospect 
before them of a morning together. But the child, troubled 
with some unimportant little ailment, was peevish and wilful, 
and the nurse’s soothing efforts for once failed of effect. And 
so Emily gave up her morning, and stayed in to nurse him. 
It was the first time she had disappointed Voysey, and her 
remorse was like remorse for some grave act of infidelity. 
Indeed, as he discovered, for her it was an infidelity ; she 
could never forgive herself for being unable to offer him the 
whole of her love, for being under the necessity for dividing 
and sharing it. 

The next time they were alone there was a shade of con- 
straint in her manner. It was as if she felt there was some- 
thing that had to be put right between them before things 
could be happy again. She was silently asking him to forgive 
her. But to him it seemed obvious that there was nothing 


VOYSEY 


183 


to forgive. He had never been jealous of the child, he liked 
Emily the better for her devotion to it, and it was perplexing 
to him that she should not understand this, that she should 
consider him capable of resentment of this kind, that she 
should suppose he required her atonement. And yet, on the 
other hand, at such times he felt his own reasonableness to be 
a great reproach — ardent devotions are never reasonable, all 
religions have their “ follies ’’ ; beside her fervent worship at 
the shrine of the idolatrous mysteries, he recognized his own 
share in the office as but a poor and imperfect surrender. 
Granted that the mysteries were idolatrous and to be con- 
demned, hers was the finer service. 

For the most part she avoided bringing her two loves into 
comparison, contenting herself rather with making her atone- 
ment inexplicitly and by implication. But she said to him 
once : — 

“ You are the only two beings in the world I love.” 

“ And his is the first claim,” Voysey said. But seeing that 
she looked at him doubtingly, uncertainly, he added : “ The 
little fellow’s is the older claim.” 

She was still silent, and he went on : “I am not inclined 
to put my claim at all low — oh, not by any means. But I 
recognize a limit to it. I have no wish to encroach on the 
boy’s claim — that in the end is the more sacred.” 

But she protested. “ No, no, not more sacred,” she said. 
“ Don’t say that. It can’t be more sacred.” Then, impul- 
sively, she cried : “ You know you do come first, you always 
will, only ” 

He checked her. And perhaps he would still have checked 
her even if his service at the shrine had been a quite perfect 
service; certainly, as it was, he was sincere in his wish to 
keep what seemed to him the purest element in her life outside 
as far as possible, and apart from, the sullying intercourse of 
their passion. 


184 


VOYSEY 


And the very intensity of her love would bring a reaction. 
There were days when she seemed to recoil from her own 
lavish generosity — from the thought of having put herself in 
his power; days of perverse little exactions, days when she 
was the victim of bitter, uncontrollable impulses, when she 
ached with a desire to put him in the wrong, when, as against 
her usual placidity, her indifference to small disputes, she 
became possessed of a passion of contradiction, became wholly 
unreasonable, unmanageable, as tiresome as a naughty child. 
On these days Voysey felt a strain upon every link of his self- 
control. And then would come paroxysms of remorse, and 
passages between them of vehement reconciliation. 

Arthur’s engagements allowed him to take a holiday of six 
weeks this year, and Voysey was under agreement with Emily 
to be at Morebay for four of them ; but before the first ten 
days were over she had drawn a promise from him that re- 
covered the remaining two. There was an arrangement that 
Nell should return to London about the middle of September 
(Miss Voysey was talking of Dresden), and that Voysey should 
keep her company until her going up to Cambridge in October. 
After that, he had still some thought of a flight to the South 
for a month or two. One morning at breakfast he casually 
mentioned these plans. To Emily they were an instant 
provocation. He could scarcely say whether it was the 
prospect of the separation that provoked her, or a certain 
detachment from herself that the making of such plans implied, 
or just something in the tone of his voice, a want of consider- 
ation she suspected, a want of apology ; but the result was 
that, though Arthur’s presence prevented any open manifesta- 
tion, one of her perverse moods declared itself. When they 
went on the pier, later in the morning, it happened that for 
five minutes or so Arthur left them. Voysey’s conjecture was 
confirmed. Emily did not return to the plans — she made 
no direct attack upon him ; but she invented small exaspera- 


VOYSEY 


85 


tions, offered foolish, futile little contradictions to all he said, 
insisted upon absurdly misinterpreting quite unmistakable 
motives. Voysey kept his temper — but his dislike of these 
quarrels was intense ; they offended his taste, they got upon 
his nerves. He was almost provoked to the cowardice of 
taking her at her word and making the occasion an opportunity 
for a rupture. After dinner, for a little while, they were alone 
once more ; it was the same thing. She made no accusation, 
she stated no case against him, but the bitterness within her 
sought deliverance in all manner of perverse exasperations. 
That night Arthur took his final turn on the parade with one 
of their acquaintances, and Emily and Voysey were the first 
to reach home. 

‘‘ Come up-stairs a moment,’’ she said. 

He followed her to the drawing-room. The gas was turned 
down. There was moonlight, without, on the sea, and a few 
rays touched points here and there, the glass and the marble 
of the chimney-piece, on one side of the room. She threw 
herself into his arms, and cried silently. He tried to soothe 
her. 

“Don’t, dearest,” he said. “Pray don’t. Tell me what 
it is. There is something wrong, of course. I said some- 
thing foolish this morning that hurt you. Let me put it right. 
I know I can. There can’t be any misunderstanding between 
us.” 

She sobbed on — now passionately, hysterically. 

“ Tell me, dearest,” he said. “ Let me put it right. I 
know something I said this morning hurt you. Come — just 
tell me about it.” 

He pleaded with and soothed her as he would have soothed 
and pleaded with a child. They were strange moments : 
moments when his perception of her dependence upon him 
made a new tie of tenderness between them ; moments that 
gave him to her j moments when he acknowledged the charm 


i86 


VOYSEY 


of the weakness of this weak, wayward, and still loveable 
nature of woman. At the same time predominant with him 
was the sense of the strangeness of its having come to this 
with him too, that he should be doing what so many thousands 
of men had done before him, and this should be the kind of 
woman he was to love. 

She grew calmer : the tears came silently ; his firmness 
helped her to control her sobs ; she clung to him. 

“ I love you,” she whispered. 

He kissed her. He caressed her very gently. 

“ I love you,” she repeated. “ It’s that. All my life I had 
never loved till I knew you. I would go away with you to- 
morrow and give my whole life to making you happy, if I 
could. It is only because ” 

“You have your child,” he said. 

“ If it weren’t for that. . . . When I am horrid to you it 
is only because — because it seems as if you didn’t care. I 
can’t bear it. When I think that, it is as if something — 
I don’t know what — something sharp — were being driven 
into me — into my brain. I don’t know what happens to me.” 

“Ah, but you know I do care,” he remonstrated. “You 
must know I love you.” 

She put back her head and looked at him. Her own face 
was in shadow, but a little brightness from the moonlight 
without lighted up his. She smiled. 

“ Do you love me ? ” she asked. 

He kissed her again — on the lips. 

“ And you forgive me ? ” 

“ What is there but your love to forgive ? ” he said. 

Her head fell on his breast. She was calm now but for a 
little catching of the breath. The peace of the reconciliation 
possessed her. 

“Ah, my dear one, my dear one,” she murmured j “love 
me always like this.” 


VOYSEY 


187 


Above her head, as it rested upon him, he saw the moon- 
light lying on the common, and the clear white path upon the 
sea. They stood like that for some moments, his arm about 
her, quite still, the murmur of the sea coming to them. Then, 
with a sudden movement, she released herself from him : she 
had heard the sound of Arthur’s footsteps in the hall. 


Ill 


The sound of that footstep in the hall was an incident of 
perpetual recurrence in their intercourse, and that intercourse, 
even in its best moments, was under the blight of the memory 
or the anticipation of it. The maintenance of a constant 
deception, the need for a constant recourse to double mean- 
ings, to mean little equivocations of manner and speech, occa- 
sionally to unblushing lies, entailed a humiliation, an indignity, 
a disgust, that were not lessened for Voysey by the fact that he 
habitually saw the man he was deceiving under a certain aspect 
of the grotesque, and felt that the deception was largely dashed 
with absurdity. His sense of humour failed to reconcile him 
to the prominence of this shabby element in the business, and 
there were times when it would have been a comfort to him to 
be able to think that Emily was less unconscious of it than she 
was. 

“ Does it never occur to you,” he said to her once, after an 
act of exceptionally unfortunate dissimulation, “ that I am 
behaving despicably ? ” 

She started. “To him ? ” 

“To your husband.” 

She considered a moment. “You are very nice to him, I 
think.” 

“ If I am, it makes my position worse still. What do you 
think most people would say of it ? ” 

She nestled against him. 

“ Don’t let’s think about it,” she pleaded. “ Don’t spoil 
our time together. It will so soon be over ; oh, so soon ! ” 

i88 


VOYSEY 


89 


“They would say very ugly things/’ he insisted. 

“Don’t spoil it,” she pleaded. “We do enjoy being 
together, don’t we ? ” 

“ At what a price ! ” 

“ If it could be different — if I had only myself to think 
of ” 

“ It is horrible,” he said. “ I am always lying to him.” 

She kissed him. “ You are making me happy,” she 
whispered. 

These crises of revolt, though for the most part he had the 
decency to restrain himself from letting her know of them, had 
the power, while they lasted, almost to break the spell of the 
enervation that possessed him. The occasion on which he 
drew nearest to emancipation sprang from an incident that in 
itself was insignificant enough. When other diversions failed, 
Arthur would find in the desire for an additional newspaper 
an excuse for a stroll to the station. Voysey would go with 
him, and it happened one morning that as he was glancing at 
the table of contents of a magazine lying on the green baize 
of the bookstall, his eye was caught, in the list of contributors, 
by the name of an old friend of his, a man he had known at 
college. Voysey bought the magazine, and instead of returning 
to Emily, who was sitting on the beach that morning with the 
nurse and child, he sauntered back to their lodgings. He 
provided himself with a paper-knife, and drew a chair to the 
window. The article pleased him immensely ; the subject 
was one in which he was always ready to be interested, and 
this was quite the best thing on it he had seen for a consider- 
able time. He seemed, as he read, suddenly, almost at a touch, 
as one might say, to be restored to his natural self. His old 
world, the world in which he ordinarily moved, the world of 
his ordinary associations, was unexpectedly restored to him. 
His intelligence, that had been growing sadly dim of late, 
kindled at the flashes of his old friend’s humour j he experi- 


190 


VOYSEY 


enced the exhilaration of rapid and easy movement through a 
rare intellectual atmosphere. By the time he had finished the 
article, he had travelled a thousand miles from the things that 
immediately surrounded him. When he had put the magazine 
down, he looked about him with a sense of strangeness. The 
nude little sitting-room with its green furniture, its broken- 
springed chairs, the mirror over the chimney-piece that blankly 
repeated the mirror over the marble-topped chiffbnnier, Emily’s 
novels, her work-basket, Arthur’s field-glasses, his newspapers, 
some letters he had left on the chimney-piece, the room’s 
general air of refusing to receive a personal impression from 
these objects, its refusal to admit the possibility of its belong- 
ing to any one in particular — it all appeared to him for the 
moment extraordinarily strange and unfamiliar. How in the 
world, he found himself wondering, had he come to be there ? 
What in the world had he to do with these people ? Then 
the facts remorselessly re-asserted themselves, his mental vis- 
ion adjusted itself to the required focus, he saw the position 
as it was, and himself as he was, and the things before him as 
he had been seeing them day after day during all these four or 
five weeks, and an outbreak of revolt against himself and them, 
an outbreak that was not far removed from the passion of 
despair, swept over and possessed him. 

That afternoon he rejected the small amenities he had en- 
deavoured to sustain in his relations with Arthur, and claimed 
the hours for himself. He needed space and freedom, and 
his inclination turned to the moors. He ascended the ardu- 
ous white road which had its pleasant beginning amid the 
gardens and villas of the residents, over whose sunny lawns, 
marked with the white lines of tennis-courts, rested a quiet air 
of retirement and security that made them look to him places 
unwarrantably remote from the turmoil of lawless passions. 
He mounted past the trim palings of the villas with the shel- 
tering laurels growing above them, till the way rose between 


VOYSEY 


191 

untamed hedges and worn gates opening over dry summer 
ruts into fields where feeding cattle threw back their chewing 
mouths to lick their worried sides. He mounted till the fields 
grew vague, till unremoved growths of furze appeared in the 
middle of them, and the hedges lost their hawthorns and 
dwindled to mere rough grass-grown banks of earth, and the 
bands of turf by the roadside widened ; and even these last 
limits ceased, and nothing of man remained but the road flut- 
tering on over the crests of the undulations in the distance 
across the fine barren freedom of the moor. 

He was glad for once to have escaped from the sea, to have 
attained to silence and stillness. Clouds had gathered above 
him, and over the sunless heather lay a cool gloom, that con- 
trasted with the clear light of the blue spaces still left at inter- 
vals in the sky; in one place the sun was still shining, and the 
stems of a belt of pines in the distance were as red as if a sun- 
set glow had touched them. He turned from the road on to 
the path over the grass by the side of it, and kept on past the 
first undulations, till the moor stretched behind as it stretched 
before him, and the horizon, behind, was no longer edged by 
the sea. Then, leaving the road, he committed himself to the 
ghost of a track that made a vague line through the heather in 
the direction of the pines, behind whose gaunt boles, bare as 
the shafts of clustered columns, for a background was hung the 
grey curtain of the sky. After a little the track eluded him, 
got lost among the heather, and he roamed over rough places 
where small flowers grew, the milk-wort, the tormentilla, the 
ivy-leafed campanula with its pale blue-bells, with nothing but 
the pines to guide him. When he reached them, their sombre 
presence, rising out of the solitude, seemed to haunt and to 
deepen it, while the breeze in their high branches made a 
moaning sound that was the more mournful for the far-lying 
stillness of the moor. 

He threw himself — he was tired now — upon the brown 


92 


VOYSEY 


litter of dry needles on the ground, and stretched himself at 
his length. 

At last, for a little while, the rest he sought was vouchsafed 
to him. He had been running before the wind, before a storm 
of disgust, of horror, of self-accusation, before the stress of a 
profound moral recoil. An immense need of escape had pos- 
sessed him ; the need to get away from all the conditions of 
the life he was leading; from the paltry little seaside place with 
its lamentable amusements and its dreadful middle-classes, its 
promiscuity of ill-dressed, ill-bred people, its proclamation of 
the measureless banalite of the average middle-class existence : 
— to get away from man and all irritating manifestations of 
him ; and still more to get away — for the recoil was perhaps 
as much physical as moral — to get away from the presence 
of woman. His irritated nerves, his unresting senses, craved 
a release from all provocation : not only from the provocation 
of the hourly contact in which he lived, but from the mere 
sight of the prolific domesticities and the obvious loves he en- 
countered on the pier and the parade. Here, for a little while, 
as he lay in the cloistral shadow of the pines, whose evenly- 
spaced stems made aisles on each side of him, on the dry litter 
of the needles, under the glimpses of the clouds through the 
dark foliage above him, he felt Nature’s soothing influence, 
and her power, in her great, still, passionless world. The 
escape he sought seemed to be given to him. It was a release 
to be looking at this sea of fading heather, lying in the cool 
transparent gloom of the grey light, at this scene with nothing 
of man in it, nothing of his impurity, and nothing of his pu- 
rity, nothing of either his glories or his falls. It was just in this 
that the appeal of nature had always lain for him — in its ne- 
gation of man ; in the sense it had always given him of some- 
thing behind and beyond man, something he would never 
subdue, never possess, never explain, never bring under his 
law nor make moral : something that would go on eluding 


VOYSEY 


93 


him to the end, and would remain when all his explanations, 
his sciences, his religions, his civilizations had passed away, 
and had ceased to attempt to encroach on it. He loved the 
dear old untamed pagan world of nature ; loved it not only 
for its beauty but for its unfathomable silence in the presence 
of all our questionings ; loved it for its twilights and the grey 
mists that hung in its far distances, and gave his spirit its last 
chance of mystery. For he was in love with the Beyond, 
with the infinite — the false infinite, the infinite that is the 
negation of the finite world. 

For a little while thought ceased, and it was as if he were 
conscious, as he lay on his litter of needles in the melancholy 
of the pines, of nothing whatever but sensation. Then un- 
expectedly, as it were by a change in the blood, thought awoke 
again. It awoke, and drew him insidiously back again in the 
old direction. And he thought of her more kindly now. It 
may have been a reaction from the violence of his revolt from 
her; or it may have been that he had begun at last to feel 
that there was a void in the waste around him ; or perhaps it 
was with him as it is with many men, with whom a woman’s 
power of attachment is strengthened less by her fidelity to 
them than by their infidelities to her — however it was, his 
thought returned to her — and it returned more kindly. She 
had a troubling possession of his memory. The best of what 
had been between them came back to him. It seemed as if 
he could almost hear the sound of her dress, feel the touch of 
her hand, the pressure of her lips upon his. In spite of all 
that could be said on the other side, and of all that ought to 
be said, he came very near to respecting her love : the love 
that is always wrong, always punished, always unhappy, the 
love that has all the forces of the world against it ; the love 
which every religion has condemned and every artist has glori- 
fied, which saints have prayed against and saints have sinned 
for ; the love which gives to character its supreme chance and 


94 


VOYSEY 


opportunity ; the love that could bring an hour of fuller life 
into the existence even of a commonplace young woman 
dwelling in a picturesque villa amid the manifold discourage- 
ments of a London suburb. 

“ Ah, God help me ! ” he cried. “ I am in love with her ! ” 

His humour recognized that there was an end to his rest, 
and, a little later, he left the pines and made his way back 
over the moor. The afternoon had passed away, and by the 
time he was once more among the villas above the town, the 
light had begun to fail, and the autumn mist was creeping 
over the pleasantness of the lawns. The first lamp he came 
to was lighted, a lamp that the laurels growing above the trim 
palings of a villa seemed almost to touch, and he saw presently, 
when he reached a point from which he could look well over 
upon the town, that the lamps were making dotted lines across 
the dusk down in the streets below. A whiteness lay upon 
the sea, and in the sky, in the distance, across the river, the 
sunset had left a line of red. Their dining-room was deep 
in twilight when he entered it j there was only light enough 
from the window for him to see that the table had not been 
cleared. 

In a moment Emily was with him. 

“ Bertie, is that you ? ” 

It was too dark to see her face, but he divined by one of 
those intuitions strong emotion will sometimes give us that 
she was in a mood of intense expectation, and divined that 
her state was not, as he might have conjectured, to be 
attributed to speculation as to the meaning of his own long 
disappearance. 

“ Something has happened ? ” he said. 

He imagined she was smiling. She turned his face to the 
window as if she hoped her eagerness might draw a few gleams 
more from the sky. 

He waited for her to tell him. In the stillness he fancied 


VOYSEY 


195 


he could hear the band that was beginning its evening per- 
formance on the pier. 

Then, putting her arms round his neck, she told him. 
‘‘We are going to be alone,’’ she said. 

“ Alone ! You mean he is going away ? ” 

“ Yes ; they have telegraphed for him. He goes to town 
to-morrow morning on business.” 


IV 


The servant, in the interest of her mistress, had just drawn 
down the blind to a level with the raised sash of the open 
window, so that the square of sunlight that had been falling 
on the faded lodging-house carpet was slightly diminished. 

“ Shall I bring breakfast, mum ? ” 

Emily glanced at the table, which was laid for two. 

“ Mr. Voysey has not had breakfast ? ” she asked. 

“No, mum; he only come down just as Mr. Detmond 
was going. He said he’d have breakfast when he come back.” 

“ Then I will wait,” Emily said. 

She stood for a moment or two, after the servant had left 
her, still looking at the table de deux converts ; her table, her 
family table, was usually a table de deux converts^ but this 
morning the innocent and prosaic disposition of the knives 
and forks had a look of its own, a suggestion of an intimacy 
of a different kind, an intimacy that was not prosaic, that had 
almost a hint at romance or adventure. She took two small 
vases of flowers that were standing on the chimney-piece and 
placed them at two corners of the table. Then she seated 
herself in a chair by the window, and the sunlight that came 
through the open space fell on the lap of her dress. The 
morning was delightfully bright. The sea — the distance was 
shortened by a haze — was all gleaming and jewelled and blue ; 
the common was dotted with stray figures — the forms of men 
in flannels with towels round their necks, who were returning 
from an early bathe ; a water-cart had just passed down the 
roadway ; the children of the next house (and they were 
many) were talking by the railings with the children of the 

196 


VOYSEY 


97 


next house but one, of whom there were many too ; the paper- 
boy was just beginning his rounds. Fifty yards down the road 
a German band was playing for the enlivenment of the large 
hotel. The soft warm September sunlight lay over it all — 
the children, the roadway discoloured by the watering, the 
crumpled shakos of the musicians and the brass of their instru- 
ments, the worn grass of the common, the glittering sea, — 
and for the moment Morebay was pardonable. 

Emily’s eyes wandered back into the shaded room again 
and rested on the table. It was just as expressive. It gave 
her just the same impression. And it had the effect of reviving 
an old impression of hers, the impression that had come to her 
years ago when she was first married, during the honeymoon, 
and even afterwards- when they had first settled in their 
Bedford Park villa, from the sight of the table laid for two ; 
the feeling she had had in those days came back to her with, 
as it were, just the old shadow on it, the old tinge of regret, of 
disappointment, the penetrating sense of something missing. 
The old impression came back to her so vividly, so poignantly, 
that tears almost rose to her eyes. How little blessed she had 
been in those days ! What she had missed ! What she had 
missed in comparison with this wonderful present — this 
wonderful present that was so full for her, in which the light 
shone, in which so many of her dreams had come true. 

She turned back to the window, and was just in time to 
see a white Tyrolienne hat and a light summer-suit pass the 
railings of the house next to theirs. She leaned forward, and 
Voysey saw her. He waved his hand to her pleasantly. 

He turned in at their gate, and, passing up the pebbly little 
path, came to the edge of a kind of small area that provided 
an opening for the kitchen window below. 

Emily greeted him from the dining-room window. “ Good- 
morning,” she said. 

“ Good-morning. I have seen him safely installed in his 


198 


VOYSEY 


corner, pipe and newspaper and all,” he responded. ‘‘The 
train was full. People are streaming back to London again. 
Our stout friend with the beard has gone — decked out, will 
you believe it, in a gleaming top-hat ! And the ancient clergy- 
man with the elderly relatives has gone, and the Lancashire 
man who had the pretty girls always about with him. We 
shall have Morebay to ourselves. What a superb morning it 
is ! ” he went on. “ Before breakfast, as a rule, one does not 
do justice perhaps . . . but it is really superb ! I was almost 
moved to give the German band sixpence.” 

Emily made some response, but she spoke so low — divining 
that the window beneath was open — that he failed to hear 
her. “ Come in,” she said. 

He hung his hat on its peg in the hall and joined her. 

“ What was it you said ? ” he asked. 

She had left the window and was standing near the table. 
For a moment after the brightness without, the room appeared 
to him dim ; it was in shadow, but a shadow which the beat 
of sunlight on the blind made warm and bright and shot gleams 
across, and her figure stood out with an effect of singular 
charm against the warmth of the subdued glow. She was 
admirably fresh and bright ; there were gleams from the blind 
in her hair. She paused before she greeted him, and her 
expression and her attitude suggested that the pause had a 
certain meaning in it. He followed her glance to the table, 
and it gave him an inkling as to what the meaning of the 
pause might be. She saw that he understood, and smiled as 
she put out her hand. He drew her to him and kissed her. 

“ I am afraid I have kept you waiting,” he apologized. 

She returned his kiss. 

“ I am glad you didn’t have breakfast,” she said. 

Then she added : “ Is it really true, do you think ? ” 

“ It looks a little as if it were ! ” he laughed, and he touched 
her hair where the gleams caught it. 


VOYSEY 


99 


She let him keep his arm about her. “We mustn’t lose 
one minute of it,” she said. “ There’s only till to-morrow.” 

She released herself. She stooped and picked up a leaf that 
had fallen from a vase on the table. 

The servant brought in the breakfast. 

Voysey went to the window and drew the blind up a little. 

“We must have a little more of this superb sunlight,” he 
declared. “ Such mornings in autumn are priceless.” 

When the girl had left them, and they had seated themselves 
at the familiar table, the sunlight was with them still. With 
both of them was the same stirring sense of adventure. They 
were radiant, both of them, with the romance of it, with their 
delight in their freedom, in their escape from restraint and 
release from humiliation, radiant with their delight in them- 
selves. The world for once had come round to them. Emily 
had never been so young, had never been so nearly a girl, and 
her little caresses of manner and speech and playful ways had 
a charm for Voysey, whose life had never had enough youth 
in it. They were just like children at play. They had no 
past behind and no future before them ; they had nothing but 
this rare present. Voysey was in the vein for small pleasant- 
ries, and Emily, though not much given to merriment, enjoyed 
seeing him in such spirits and yielded to his laughter, content- 
ing herself with hinting at the claims of sentiment from time 
to time by letting her hand steal over the table-cloth to take 
his. She delighted in watching him. She even went the 
length, which nobody else had ever ventured to go, the length 
of thinking him handsome. She liked watching the cleverness 
gather in his face. There had been a time, not very remote, 
when his cleverness had frightened her a little, when she had 
resented it, but now, at all events this morning, she felt so 
sure of him that she really believed it didn’t matter. There 
was a point of malice, perhaps, in the thought that so much 
superiority should make no difference. And she liked his face 


200 


VOYSEY 


so much better for being sunburnt ; it was brown and bronzed 
just as she liked to see it, while the sun always dealt unkindly 
with Arthur’s countenance by warming it to a flaming red, to 
the colour of an ill-chosen brick. The colour of Arthur’s face 
seemed to call for apology. Indeed, at the seaside, in his 
flannels, Arthur did not look nice. Voysey, on the other hand, 
looked remarkably nice — as nice as the young men who make 
love at the theatre, she thought, with the difference that she 
considered him more of a gentleman. And this morning, in 
his lightness, his fun, his merriment, a merriment that was 
unlike anything she had seen in him before, he continued still 
to be himself ; and this meant for her that he kept a certain 
grace in it all, responded kindly to her little hints at the claims 
of sentiment, managed at no long intervals to say some very 
nice things to her. 

As the meal drew to an end, they approached the question 
as to how they were to make the most of this precious day. 

“To begin with, for a change, let us dine late,” Voysey 
suggested. 

The proposal pleased her. “ It will be like that other 
evening,” she said, “ that evening at home.” 

He looked at her. “ It will be much better.” 

She was troubled by his look. She laughed a little, ner- 
vously. “We shall have the whole evening,” she said. 

“ The whole of it,” he repeated. “ And to-morrow ” 

“To-morrow will never come! There will be no to- 
morrow I ” she exclaimed. 

He, too, laughed a little. “ At all events not till to-morrow,” 
he said. 

They were silent. For the moment something troubled 
them both. 

“Well,” she resumed. “We dine late, then. I suppose 
this morning,” she suggested doubtfully, “ I ought to go into 
the town after breakfast and do some shopping.” 


VOYSEY 


20 


“ Very good. We will go shopping. I will come with you.” 

“ That will be nice.” She hesitated. “ You don’t mind ? ” 
she added apologetically. 

“ I like it. I have a great respect for your driving of the 
domestic coach. You are very good at it. We will have our 
romance this afternoon. You have not seen Stert Bay yet. 
It’s a lovely spot. What do you say to a drive out there after 
luncheon? We shall have plenty of time if we dine late 
enough.” 

Emily agreed. “ But the other is a little bit romantic too, 
isn’t it ? ” she asked. 

“ It’s all romantic ! Every bit of it ! ” he declared. “ It is 
just the most romantic thing in the world ! ” 

She left her place and went to him. “ The romance is be- 
ing together,” she said. “ It doesn’t matter what we do.” 

They kept the sunlight, they took the sense of romance, of 
adventure, their delight in the first freshness and freedom of it 
all, with them into the “ improved ” little streets and not very 
inspiriting shops where Emily transacted her morning’s business. 
The romance was with them still, for, as she had said, the 
romance lay in their being together, but the prose of it did not 
escape Voysey, who was amused by her competence, her know- 
ledge of prices and qualities, her deep determination to be 
perfectly served. Still he understood that, in spite of her 
competence, she was not sorry to have him with her ; his pres- 
ence tended to diminish her sense of responsibility, was a sort 
of protection, while he was of actual use in the occasional 
emergencies of arithmetic. And in these little unexpected 
lapses to dependence he managed to discover something that 
was not without charm ; indeed it occurred to him, and the 
observation added to his amusement, that a small sum in 
arithmetic by a grocer’s counter made a definite contribution 
to their intimacy. She had been perfectly right : there was 
romance in these things too. 


202 


VOYSEY 


In the afternoon, however, when they fulfilled the morning’s 
plan and set out on their drive in the hired fly — a vehicle of a 
very leisurely progress and with a suspicion of mustiness and of 
the stable-yard given out by its cushions — they returned to the 
other kind of romance — the good, old-fashioned, picturesque, 
time-honoured kind, which sentiment consecrates to lovers. 

It was a day to further illusions. The glitter of the morning 
had lost the edge of its eagerness, as it were, of its joyousness, 
and had become rather the suffused brightness of a maturer 
light, a light that still kept much of the warmth and pretence 
of summer, but had no longer its promise of continuance, its 
assurance of return — a brightness that set you numbering the 
hours, and forbade you to count on the morrow. Their way 
took them across the low white bridge, whose innumerable 
small wooden arches left a line of shadow over the broad tidal 
stream, on which among the boats at anchor there was but 
little movement now, and already, here and there, a yacht near 
the shore had the skeleton-like look about its rigging of a boat 
laid up for the winter. The road mounted, not far beyond the 
bridge, through a kind of cutting to the high ground lying 
behind the cliffs ; the shadow between the sunless banks of the 
cutting had the damp chill of autumn, and the grass on the 
slopes looked wet. They passed, at the summit, into sunlight 
again, and received an impression of sunlight lying evenly and 
constantly over the whole breadth of the landscape. The 
fields to the left of the road were edged with the colour of the 
sea ; they were barren fields with broken hedges and a profusion 
of ragwort, nothing but mere enclosures reclaimed from the 
cliffs ; on the horizon, in the haze, were the ghosts of dim 
steamers, with their rising bows and trails of faint smoke in 
tremulous wisps. Inland, on the right, below them, they had a 
cultivated country with a roll of wooded undulations — stretches 
of grey ploughed land that showed very light in the sunshine ; 
root-crops with their shades of metallic green ; small farm-cot- 


VOYSEY 


203 


tages, tiled from the first storey upwards, lichen-grown, in colour 
a warm, dull red, with chickens in the home field, and utensils 
by the door set to dry in the sun, and cloths on the garden 
hedge : woods that were still the property of summer ; and 
in the marsh-like meadows, in the hollows that the road crossed, 
little brooks in which the reeds, blown by the wind, swayed 
in ranks like bowing men, and flashed the vividness of their 
green against the dulness and deadness of the grass. And the 
hired town fly made its slow progress along the rather lonely 
high-road, between blackberry hedges, past worn gates and 
bits of deserted-looking wall and thisHes and nettles growing 
at the foot of them, — rising from the hollows to the high 
ground again where the larger prospect was given back. They 
passed few vehicles ; the houses for the most part lay off the 
road ; and such signs of life as they saw seemed to lie in the 
distance too — a shepherd moving his sheep to fresh feed from 
the bare cropped end of a clover field, a man carting manure 
and leaving it in long even lines of small mounds, a solitary 
figure following a foot-path. And to Emily and Voysey a cer- 
tain oppression came, imperceptibly, a decline of spirits, a pas- 
siveness, from long contemplation of the wide prospect, from 
the sunlight and the strong air, from the long, even, leisurely 
movement ; they became less conscious of themselves, grew 
silent like people who have been long together, and found it 
enough to lie back in the carriage and listen to the changing 
note of the wheels, as they rolled over smooth places of the 
road or grated through patches of loosened stones. 

They were not sorry when the fly stopped at a white cot- 
tage, with a diminutive garden before it, and a board, by the 
garden hedge, bearing an offer of inoffensive refreshment — an 
offer repeated on a soiled card in the window. They left the 
cottage, and turned into a lane that led towards the glen and 
the sea. Stiff from the confinement of the carriage they 
were glad to be in movement again ; they had grown a little 


204 


VOYSEY 


tired, too, of their silence, of the sound of the wheels, of the 
monotony of their driver’s back. The feel of the firm surface 
of the road under their feet was like a new pleasure to them. 
At the first bend the lane made Emily took Voysey’s arm, and 
it seemed, as it were, as if she were once more asserting her 
claim to him. 

She looked up in his face. “ What have you been thinking 
about,” she asked, “ all this time ? ” 

“ Oh, I have given up thinking ! ” he laughed. “ The time 
has gone by for it.” 

She smiled. “That’s right. You think so much too 
much, you know.” 

“ I shouldn’t be surprised, though, if I began again ! ” 

“ Not to-day.” 

“ But if there’s to be no to-morrow ? ” 

She shook her head. “ I don’t know ; I am afraid to-mor- 
row will come all the same.” 

“ And what shall we think then ! ” 

T'he lane was narrow, and a blackberry branch that 
protruded from the hedge had caught the braid at the bottom 
of her dress. She stooped to release herself. 

“Never mind to-morrow,” she said, when she had taken his 
arm again. “It has not come yet. We have to-day.” 

Ah, we have more than to-day,” he added."^ ? 

She leaned a little more heavily on his arm. He felt she 
was trembling a little. 

They had reached the gate at which the lane ended. The 
track through the glen — a rugged open little glen with boulders 
rising out of bracken that was now both green and gold — 
followed the course of a small stream with the smooth blades 
of the iris growing by its edge, past hawthorns bending from 
the sea, wind-blown and withered, showing red berries in places 
on branches that were already bare. The descent was long, 
and the track by the stream got lost in small swamps at times. 


VOYSEY 


205 


to cross which Voysey trod down the tufts of coarse grass for 
stepping-places, and Emily followed him, followed him till 
the track left them on the beach of a little bay. 

It was a desolate little bay, with nothing but the sea there, 
and the sea had a look of possessing it, of being curiously at 
home there, as it broke in cheerful little waves on the space of 
sand and fine shingle that the ebbing tide left wet and gleam- 
ing below the bank of large pebbles, on which the seaweed, dry, 
shrivelled, tangled with bits of wood and rubbish, the refuse 
and leaving of the sea, showed the curving line of high-water 
mark. In the sunny stillness, in which the sharp, regular plash 
of the waves fell crisp and clear, their entrance into a place so 
private, so unpossessed of man, so faithful to the sea, had 
almost an air of intrusion. Emily chose a spot above the sea- 
weed of the high-water mark, where a rock provided what 
she called a “ back,” and Voysey, having thrown a few of the 
more inhospitable looking pebbles away, stretched himself at 
his length beside her. 

Somehow the silence returned. The flashes of brightness 
their spirits had given out upon their release from the carriage 
somehow lost their sparkle. Voysey, with whom the exuber- 
ance of the morning had been as transient as it was unusual, 
was less conscious of the change in himself than of the change 
in Emily, who, as she sat with her back against the sun-warmed 
rock, her face just shaded by her parasol, was absorbed by the 
influence that was upon her, whatever that influence may have 
been. And he was glad of this little interval — glad, in a sense, 
to have the moments to himself. They were moments, it 
appeared to him, worth arresting, prolonging, holding back 
from their passage to the past. A sense of immense well- 
being was upon him : it was immeasurably good to be there. 
In spite of the full sunlight and golden radiance of the autumn 
afternoon there was something like a sense of mystery in the 
air — so deep was the stillness that brooded over the sunlit 


206 


VOYSEY 


pebbles, so full was the place of the presence, the sound, the 
unceasing movement, the mysterious immensity of the sea. It 
was so good to be lying in the warmth and the sunlight, satis- 
fied, at rest, quiescent, with the brooding stillness broken only 
by the plash of the crisp little waves, with the ghostly steamers 
in the misty distance passing in and out the dark patches of 
reflected cloud, and free from all troubles of nerves and im- 
agination, penetrated by the thought of what the hours were 
to give him, of a night when for once the darkness would not 
bring separation, to have attained for a little while to a sense 
of innermost reconciliation to and at oneness with the spirit of 
the natural world. He experienced an intense and intimate 
response to these things, but a response that had the perverse 
effect of loosening their hold upon him. Ever since the morn- 
ing there had been with him a passiveness : it had been as if a 
holiday stillness reigned in the workshop of his brain ; he had 
given himself up to the passing moments ; they and Emily had 
possessed him. Now by his response to the things about him, 
by some quickening of perception it brought, some intensifying 
of impressions, by the working of some accident of unconscious 
association, the wheels were set in motion again. He experi- 
enced a movement towards the beginning of a return to the 
mental possession of himself. For this very quickening of the 
consciousness of his enjoyment implied a detachment from it 
— a certain standing aside; insensibly from experience he was 
passing to analysis, from simple delight in the woman beside 
him he was moving away to the thought of her; and the spell 
of reality suffered some weakening, there was some weakening 
of the bonds of love. 

Presently Emily turned to him. “ How lovely it is here ! ” 
she murmured. 

“ It is immensely good to be here,’’ he said. “ So good that 
one is almost able to forgive.” 

‘‘To forgive ! ” 


VOYSEY 


207 


He laughed. “ You don’t feel that ? ” 

“ I don’t understand you. Who is one to forgive ? ” 

“ Le hon Dieu — for not making one happier.” 

She put out her hand to him. “ Not these things now,” 
she pleaded. 

“ But it is just these things that make the present what it is. 
In the sound of the waves — the joy of it is that it is that sound 
and not other sounds one is familiar with ; not the roll of the 
wheels, the murmur of the streets, the booming of the traffic. 
The joy of an autumn afternoon like this, of the warmth and 
the sunlight, the glittering sea, the haze there, lies in the 
thought of the other autumn afternoons that are coming — of 
the afternoons when one will see the red of the smoky sky 
glowing above the lighted lamps, and the grey line of pave- 
ment stretching under the shadowy houses.” 

“ You are thinking of London ! ” 

‘‘ Isn’t one always — more or less ? ” 

“ Of London ! — here ! ” 

“ Isn’t the thought of it always here ? if not consciously, 
in a latent sense of contrast ? ” 

“ Oh don’t ! I don’t want to think of it. It shortens the 
time to think of it. I want to forget that any such place 
exists.” 

He laughed. “ It is waiting for us, you know. It is like 
a great monster that is waiting to swallow us up.” 

“ I won’t listen to you,” she said. She withdrew her hand, 
and playfully lowered her parasol a little so that she hid her 
face. He kept his eyes on her. He could still see her throat 
and a little of her chin through the white lace of the parasol, 
while he noticed that its handle, which rested against her shoul- 
der, made a hard line against the soft full curve of her breast. 
The light summer blouse she was wearing favoured the grace 
and suppleness of her figure, and her skirt, that lay loose about 
her, almost touched his knees. She had always had the power 


208 


VOYSEY 


to penetrate the weak places of his armour, and the conscious- 
ness of the near approach of possession is not soothing for the 
senses ; but, at that moment, as he looked at her, his imagina- 
tion took, unexpectedly, a much wider flight. His imagination 
played him a trick of a kind it had played him more than once 
before — of a kind he had always expected it would play him 
at just such a time as this ; it leapt from the present, across 
the intervening hours, and gave him, as it were, a feeling as if 
he were looking back. He was conscious of a sudden recoil. 
He was conscious of a sudden reluctance. ^These matters had 
become with him so much a question of the imagination ; the 
indulgence he had permitted his passions, his desires, had been 
so purely imaginative, that now in proportion as the fact that 
the reality lay but a few hours off came home to him, that 
reality seemed to lose its value. His imagination failed to 
respond to it. Was it, after all, he found himself wondering, 
quite worth while? Was it worth while to bring this mis- 
chief, this stain, this inevitable defilement, into a woman’s life? 
What hitherto had passed between them might be undone; 
time would weaken the memory of it ; in the crowd of inci- 
dents time would bring it would be jostled into the background 
and would lose its prominence : but the other thing was irrep- 
arable. No woman, he fancied, was ever the same woman 
after that. If it did not entail the blight of a life-long regret, 
it would entail an immense deterioration. The passage of 
these thoughts through his brain occupied a very short interval 
— in fact, no more than the minute or two during which she 
turned away and kept her parasol before her face. But during 
that minute or two that he looked at her, her youth, her sex, 
her defencelessness, her ignorance, the half-pathetic feeling she 
had always given him that she was like a vessel adrift on the 
ocean of life, spoke for her, and touched his chivalry and his 
pity : a reluctance to spoil her life, a reluctance to risk making 
either an unhappy woman of her or a bad one, came over him ; 


VOYSEY 


209 


the tide of passion ebbed ; desire for the moment died. No : 
it would be better that offence should not come by him. 

She lifted her parasol and peeped out. “ Well, Bertie ! ” 

He was still looking at her. 

“ Well, Bertie ! ” she repeated. 

He smiled. How can it be that a little thinking, just the 
thoughts of a minute or two, can make so immense a differ- 
ence ? “ Well ! ” he echoed. 

Her face darkened. “You’re going to say something dis- 
mal,” she declared. 

He laughed. “ Oh no. I’m as merry as a bird ! ” But 
seeing how little his assurance had done to lift the shadow 
from her face, and having no better assurance to offer her, he 
added : “ I am afraid we ought to be going, do you know. 
We have a long drive, and when the sun has gone down it will 
be cold. The evenings are chilly now.” He got up as he 
spoke ; and Emily followed him. 

The ascent of the glen took some little time. The sun was 
still shining on the bracken on the slope above them, but the 
boulders on the opposite side of the glen and all the hollow 
by the stream were in shadow, and a shadow that, after the 
warmth and radiance of the beach, looked dreary and grey 
and cold. From the sunless little stream the chill evening 
damp seemed already to be rising. Emily was not fond of 
climbs, and now, when she was tired, the rough places ap- 
peared to her to grow at once more frequent and more tire- 
some. Her mood had changed. Voysey felt she had divined 
that there was a difference in him, that something had hap- 
pened to him, and he felt it was a difference she resented. 
At each steep little bit, at each squishy little swamp, her 
complaints became more urgent. And he did not try to 
propitiate her : partly because experience had shown him that 
all attempts at propitiation were useless, that these moods 
must run their course j and partly because he welcomed the 


210 


VOYSEY 


momentary alienation, which, in spite of a firm desire not to 
be alienated, these moods always had the effect of working in 
him. 

At first the drive, too, seemed likely to be long. After a 
little while the sun left them, and a grey mistiness began to 
gather in the valley below the road, to creep under the edges 
of the woods, to rest and lie sadly in the loamy furrows. The 
twilight came ; the distances grew blurred ; a general dimness, 
a darkening of colour, a fading of clear outlines and promi- 
nences, something that had the sadness of the suggestion of a 
loss of separate and individual existence, stole over all things 
as they passed into and were absorbed by the damp, misty, 
autumn dusk. The hedges by the roadside made dark lines ; 
the friendly, human-looking forms of sign-posts, pointing to 
remote, improbable places, places it was hard to believe in, 
grew ghostly white; the ponds by the road and the little 
streams they crossed were vivid in the gloom, rosy reflections 
of the still lighted clouds lingering on their quiet surfaces ; 
a deep, steely blue spread over the eastern sky. When at the 
foot of a hill they paused for their driver to take off the skid, 
they heard, in the stillness left by the cessation of the grating 
wheels, sheep feeding in a neighbouring field, and a dog bark- 
ing in the distance. A little way beyond them the smoke of 
burning weeds was drifting heavily across the road. The 
pungent, earthy smell hung upon the damp air. 

Voysey’s reluctance was deepening. Emily had not yet 
forgiven him, and his detachment from her, their momentary 
estrangement — it was nothing more — helped him to the re- 
covery of himself, helped to restore his natural clearness of 
vision. He was cold : his light summer coat was of indiffer- 
ent service against the assaults of the penetrating air ; he was 
a little tired ; it was some hours since he had eaten ; and 
these small physical discomforts quickened, if they tended to 
depress, his imagination in its response to the circumstances 


VOYSEY 


211 


of the hour. The mood, indeed, of nature just then was not 
one for the encouragement of vanities ; she had put out her 
illusions with a ruthless hand, made a grim return upon the 
genial hours : the world around had become a world of dark 
empty spaces, a cold, chaste, unresponsive, unhuman world, a 
world into which it was not difficult to read a menace of hard 
dealing for transgressors. And his imagination responded to 
her mood, and the form the response took was that of a 
return among the misdoings of his past. It was not, as he 
was quite aware, the purity of his life that had come to his 
aid, but its impurity — his store of evil experiences, his store 
of impure memories. There came back to him, like a vision 
of the night, the remembrance of old indulgences — of old 
surrenders to lawless joys and of the intolerable disgusts that 
had followed them. Just as he now saw the light fading from 
the pale sky above the dark and desolate world, he could re- 
member, after abominable nights, seeing a light as pale and 
desolate creeping in at the windows of tainted rooms, or 
breaking above the greyness of empty, dishevelled-looking 
streets. The memory of these old disgusts, of the loathing 
of himself for his weakness, his folly, his brutality, all the 
miseries of disordered nerves that are the penalty of luxurious 
vigils, the temporary awakening of the old lurking sense of 
apprehension, that terror that had haunted his boyhood, came 
back to him vividly in the darkness — came back with such 
extraordinary vividness that he could evoke a vision of him- 
self standing, upon his return home, in the hall of the house 
in Harley Street, and an impression of the peculiar poignant 
sense of reproach with which the old place would greet him 

the familiar place that was so eloquent of the decencies of 

life, of its better traditions, and so eloquent, too, in its sinister 
way, of the wages that reward light living. . . . No, of all 
illusions and vanities this was the grossest, the most odious, 
the most cruel. Most distinctly it was not worth while! 


212 


VOYSEY 


Distinctly he had no wish to begin again. He had no wish 
to add to the evil hoard of his memories another that would 
be the most ignoble of them all. He had no wish to be the 
means of adding another to the host of miserable women, the 
host of blighted, betrayed, dishonoured women, who, beguiled 
from the fair and seemly paths of life, have been doomed to 
take their place in the pitiful and endless procession of the 
shames and ignominies of the world. 


V 


By the clock, on the chimney-piece in the sitting-room 
up-stairs, it was just ten. In the crudity of the gaslight that 
left no shadows, that exposed, with no softening nor kindly 
mitigation of their colours or surfaces, the walls, the corners, 
the ceiling, the pictures, the ornaments on the chimney-piece 
and the ornaments on the marble-topped chifFonnier, the room 
had more than ever its air of a transient occupation, its look 
of inhospitable nudity. Voysey was alone. In the mirror of 
the chifFonnier, before which he happened to be standing, he 
saw, in a dimmer and greener repetition, the chandelier be- 
hind him with its two lighted burners, together with the 
mirror and the florid gilt clock and the large red vases on the 
chimney-piece. He turned to the door. Some one had 
knocked. 

“ Come in.” 

It was the servant who had' brought a candle and had come 
to receive the last orders for the night. 

“ No, I think we shall want nothing more,” he said. 

The girl placed the candle on the chifFonnier. 

“ Will you put out the gas, please ? ” 

“Yes, I’ll see to the gas.” 

She moved to the door. 

“ Good-night, sir.” 

“ Good-night.” 

Just, however, as she was leaving the room, Voysey called 
her back. “I think Mrs. Detmond did say she wanted to 
speak to you. You are on your way up-stairs ? ” 

“Yes, sir.” 


213 


214 


VOYSEY 


“You will find her with nurse. Wait a moment,” he 
added. “ I think I hear some one moving overhead. I ex- 
pect Mrs. Detmond has come down to her own room.” 

The servant withdrew. 

He heard the girl take up the candle she had left on the 
table outside: he caught the clink of a can against the metal 
of the candlestick. She passed the door and went on up the 
stairs, mounting with the dragging steps of one who labours 
under burdens, with the heavy slow tread of one who is tired. 
The footsteps overhead moved across the room. A minute or 
two later he heard the opening of another door, probably the 
door of his own bedroom, on the other side of the landing. 
Then, once more, he caught the creak of the stairs under the 
girl’s tread, as she continued her way to the storey above. 
The footsteps overhead had ceased. 

Voysey moved to the window. 

The blind was up, and the darkness without offered, as it 
were, a momentary escape from the gaslight : to be looking 
at nothing — the reflection of the light in the room on the 
window-panes prevented his seeing even the lamps in the road 
below — tended to relieve the irritation of his nerves. He 
remained by the window for some minutes. Suddenly, how- 
ever, the sound of a movement in the room above reached him 
again, and had the effect of making him turn from the window. 

He began to pace the room, but after a turn or two paused 
by the billowy, broken-springed little sofa beside the chiffbn- 
nier and picked up a magazine that was lying on it. It was 
the magazine he had bought at the station yesterday ; his eye 
fell on his old friend’s name. To his excited fancy the sober 
print had almost the power of evocation of the magic ink of 
the clairvoyant. He seemed no longer to be alone ; there 
seemed to be a presence by his side ; but a presence so 
shrewd, so humorous, so whimsical, so derisive, so intolerably 
alert to the situation, that Voysey threw the magazine away. 


VOYSEY 


215 


Still, he stood for a moment or two looking at it. Then, as 
he heard again the sound of the footsteps overhead, he joined 
in the imagined merriment of his friend. He laughed aloud. 
He laughed; and the walls of the ugly little room gave him 
back the misery of his laughter. 

The situation was grotesque. The situation was dramatic 
to the point of absurdity. His sense of humour revolted. In 
the long run the preachers, no doubt, are right : “ Moral 
qualities rule the world ; ” chaos waits on the withdrawal of 
their supremacy : but the word of the preacher does not cover, 
and has never covered, the whole ground of human nature. 
Man is a difficult, perverse, complex being, a being of many 
instincts and many impulses, of many humours and many 
moods, who has never accepted any permanent limitation in 
the variety of his points of view ; who has always believed 
that in the large scheme of things his unregenerate side, too, 
has its value — and has also its right to expression. The 
common-sense of the world has always protested, in life and 
in literature, against the being righteous over-much. And 
Voysey, who accepted the comedy of amorous adventure, felt 
that these scruples of his, this hesitation, this ill-timed re- 
luctance, gave the gods their opportunity for laughter. The 
scene that was coming looked blankly impossible. The role 
of virtue for a man is one it needs some little management 
to keep dignified even when the virtue is consistent and sin- 
cere : but his virtue ! . . . How explain to a woman to 
whom you have made passionate love and v/hom you have 
suffered to make love to you, that unexpectedly, at the eleventh 
hour, with the cup at your lips, you have become the pos- 
sessor of a conscience !' :There was something almost indecent 
in a reluctance so profoundly unseasonable. At a certain 
point, surely, matters should be taken for granted. And was 
it quite fair to the woman ? Is it quite fair to bring a woman 
SO far upon the road only to betray her by suddenly turning 


2I6 


VOYSEY 


back ? If this is forbearance of a kind women very rarely 
forgive, after all are they not right ? In the code of honour 
it is left sometimes to occasion to word the clauses : if your 
consideration places a woman in a position so lamentably 
false, isn’t it possible there may be a flaw in its delicacy ? 

These reflections — his sense of the situation, its difficulty, 
its absurdity, its humour, of the humiliation it was pretty 
certain to bring him — added acutely to the misery of the 
interval while he waited for Emily to come down, but they 
left him with the courage of his resolution. That menace of 
the evening sky was still vivid in his memory; and still vivid 
the reluctance that had come to him on the beach, the warn- 
ing to abstain and forbear, the impulse not to spoil her life, 
not to take an advantage of her love for the taking of which, 
in his own love, there was no adequate justification. For 
wasn’t the root of the matter just this — that his forbearance 
was a palpable accusation of his love ? Would he have for- 
borne — would the fact that the balance of right was on the 
side of forbearance ever have come home to him, if he had 
had the justification of a perfect love And in the face of 
a doubt so natural, if it should occur to her, what reasoning, 
what appeals could he find, that would save his good faith 
from question ? Yet how immeasurably cruel it would be 
if he suffered her to suspect his good faith, if he so far unde- 
ceived her as to let her discover that his professions had been 
tainted with reservation. 

He was standing by the window again when Emily came 
into the room. 

“ Bertie.” 

For a moment he didn’t turn round. The confidence, the 
eagerness, the expectation her voice expressed in the tender and 
familiar utterance of his name, brought him vividly from con- 
jecture to reality. The scene had begun. And he found him- 
self clinging to the refuge of the darkness as an inexpert player 


VOYSEY 


217 


might cling to the wings before stepping into the glare of the 
foot-lights. 

Emily had paused by the table that occupied the middle of 
the room. His failure to respond struck her. The attitude 
of his figure against the blank space of the window had a look 
of dejection. She made a movement towards him. 

He turned round. 

“ Draw down the blind,” she hinted. 

As the house faced the common before the sea there were 
no opposite neighbours to overlook them ; the presence of the 
night, however, had the effect of a certain encroachment on 
their privacy. 

“ I will open the window a little. It’s intolerably close,” 
he said. 

“ It's the gas. The room was cold when we came up after 
dinner. I will turn out one of the burners.” 

Voysey drew the blind down. He waited a moment to see 
whether the air that came in would make it flap against the 
wood-work of the window-frame. The movement of the 
blind was imperceptible. 

He left the window and went to her. She threw her arms 
round his neck. “ Dearest ! ” 

f She drew him to the sofa — the broken-springed little sofa 
in the corner between the window and the chiffbnnier. She 
nestled against him. For her, too, he divined, the crisis had 
its aspect of desperation. She clung to him with passionate 
abandonment ; expressed her love with passionate intensity. 
For her, too, he felt, the passing moments were a pause 
on the brink of the irreparable — a pause to which the future 
might give the significance of a farewell on the edge of the 
abyss. For, after all, there is no such test of the quality of 
love as its power to endure the shock that comes from the loss 
of expectation ; and Voysey felt that the passionate intensity 
with which she clung to him at once came from an instinct 


2I8 


VOYSEY 


of self-justification, and was an almost desperate appeal to his 
generosity. 

The moments passed. The room was dim now ; Emily 
had lowered the one burner that was left j from the sofa 
Voysey could see the reflection of it in the mirror above the 
chimney-piece ; the room was dim, but every object in it — 
the things on the table, the books, the pattern of the wall- 
paper — was impressing itself with a marvellous distinctness 
on his memory. The room, too, was intolerably still ; an 
occasional sputter of the gas, a faint rustling of the blind, a 
rare footstep on the pavement, were the only sounds that 
reached them. Their loneliness seemed to be even deeper 
now than it had been on the beach of the little bay. The real 
world seemed to count for still less. And the confinement of 
the room gained an added weight of impression for Voysey 
from the curious haunting sense he had that a little way off, 
across the common, lay the sea, with its freedom and its 
spaciousness and the unaccusing welcome of its voice. 

The clock struck eleven. Emily raised herself a little in 
his arms. The movement, slight as it seemed, was a relief 
to him. There was a limit to his ability to withstand the 
enervation of this near contact. 

“ It is getting late,” she said. 

He released himself from her. She imagined the movement 
was a signal — an indication that he accepted the warning of 
the hour. He saw her glance round the room for the book 
and the one or two things she usually took up-stairs with her. 
Then she checked herself. She turned to him and smiled. 

He tried to smile too. He knew she was waiting for him 
to speak, to propose, to plan, to arrange. To escape her 
glance he got up. 

She rose too. She remained by the sofa — a fold of her 
dress still rested on it. She was still waiting, he felt. He 
went round the table to the chimney-piece and looked at a 
letter he had left behind one of the red vases. 


VOYSEY 


219 


“ Will you remember the gas — ” she hesitated ; her voice 
was unsteady — “ if I go first ? ” 

“Yes; I will see to it/' he said. 

There was a pause — a pause that seemed to him one of 
intolerable duration. He fumbled with the letters behind the 
vase, consciously avoiding the mirror lest her face should look 
out at him from it. Suddenly, leaving the chimney-piece, he 
turned round. 

The movement was a decision. He was quite aware how 
much his face expressed ; he knew her eyes were waiting to 
meet his. But the act, trivial as it was, gave him firmness. 
He met her eyes — he let them rest upon him; he made no 
attempt to obscure her reading of the meaning written in his 
look ; he saw her face change ; he watched a rigidity of expres- 
sion steal over it, as the sense, the purpose, the true interpre- 
tation of what was passing within him came gradually home 
to her. 

“ You have something to say,” she murmured. 

He shook his head. “ No ; only that ! ” he said. 

“ But you have ! You must have ! I see it in your 
face ! ” 

“That's all I have to say,'' he insisted; ‘(just what you 
see.'' 

She was trembling. She had moved to the table, and her 
fingers were playing mechanically with the cover of his maga- 
zine ; the paper quivered as her fingers lifted it. She was 
hopelessly at a loss. She was overwhelmed by the unexpect- 
edness of this change in him ; dismayed at finding herself 
placed at so immense a disadvantage, betrayed into a position 
so cruelly false. 

^ I wish to keep our love unspoiled,'' he said. ^ 

“ But it was you,'' she exclaimed, “ you who . . 

“Yes, it was I. This morning, I admit . . 

“ And this afternoon ... all day . . .'' 


220 


VOYSEY 


“Yes, it was I — I — I all along . . . And wasn't it horri- 
bly wrong of me ? " 

The red mounted to her cheek : it flamed there like a burn- 
ing shame. The wrong he was doing her in this betrayal of 
her consent proclaimed the situation to be beyond redemption. 
This betrayal was even worse than the other — this shame 
even less delible. The futility of his forbearance mocked 
him. How in the world had he failed to perceive that all his 
forbearance could do for them now was to substitute one form 
of wrong for another ! The colour went from her face. The 
rigidity of expression returned ; it was deepened, he fancied, by 
the quivering at the corners of her mouth. She was still 
looking at him. And he felt her perceptions were clearing. 
He felt her sure woman’s instinct was giving her guidance. 
The light of an inner illumination was beginning to shine in 
her eyes. 

She was the first to speak. 

“ Then that’s all,” she faltered. 

His defencelessness was torture to him. He craved for 
some shred of justification to oppose to the penetration of her 
gaze. But what justification of himself could he offer that 
would not be an accusation of her ? How was it possible to 
appeal to the voice of conscience without condemning her for 
being deaf to it ? And was he to pose as the champion of 
purity, when it was from his own impurity of nature, from the 
infamies of his memory and imagination, that the influences 
had come which had given him pause ! 

“ Then this is the end,” she added. 

To this, however, he demurred. 

“ Why should you say that ? ” he asked. 

“ I think,” she tried to explain, “ I begin to understand 
now.” 

“No, you do not understand. You do not understand if 
you don’t realize what this is costing me,” he said. 


VOYSEY 


22 


Here, at all events, he was sincere enough. The misery of 
his face was a witness for him. He saw that her judgment 
was arrested for a moment on its sure way to a decision. 

“ When did you change ? ” she asked. 

“ I have not changed.” 

“ But this morning ? ” 

“ Oh, this morning ! That’s a hundred years ago ! ” he 
cried, helplessly. 

“ Then just now — a few minutes ago ? Why didn’t you 
tell me ? ” 

“ What was there to tell ? Don’t I say I have not changed. 
It is not that. My love has not changed. I care as much 
as ever I cared.” 

There was a hollowness in the sound of his words even to 
his own ear. The light of illumination in her eyes leapt up 
more brightly. 

“ I wonder if you have ever cared,” she murmured, almost 
inaudibly, under her breath. 

That was what he had been waiting to hear. That ques- 
tion was the stone on which the coin of his professions was to 
be tested. 

“Ah, if you doubt that, then this is the end, indeed ! What 
in the world is there left to us ? ” 

“ Nothing,” she admitted. 

“ And you can face that ? ” 

Her expression softened. The quivering at the corners of 
her mouth became more painful. 

“ It can never be the same after this,” she said. 

“ But in the other case would it have been the same ? ” 

“ I should have believed you cared.” 

“ But I do care,” he cried. “ I tell you my love has not 
changed. It is what it has always been. I love you.” 

“ But not in that way.” 

“ Good God ! and is that the only way ? ” 


222 


VOYSEY 


He could have laughed aloud : the irony seemed so profound 
in judging love by this measure. 

“ That proves nothing,” he declared, “ in a man. There 
you have the secret of a thousand deceptions.” 

“ But if a man cares . . .” 

‘‘Yes, if he cares . . . But the point is — it is no proof 
whatever that he cares. That's where women are so miserably 
deceived.” 

There was a pause. Her face had softened : it had lost 
something of its rigidity. It expressed the misery of an utter 
dismay, the blankness of an utter bewilderment. He per- 
ceived that in spite of what had passed he had not yet lost 
his ascendency. She doubted ; the winds of doubt were 
making fine sport with the tree of her faith in him, but the 
roots had struck deep, and they held. She had not yet 
decided against him. She left the table with a movement of 
weariness, and went to the sofa, and sat in silence looking at 
his face. 

“ I know when you changed,” she said* “ It was this 
afternoon on the beach.” 

He didn’t defend himself. 

“ I suppose,” she added, “ you will go now ? ” 

“ Go ? Back to London, do you mean ? ” 

“ I suppose so. Or go abroad, I dare say. The days are 
not short enough yet for you to be in London, are they ? 
You don’t like London till the short days. Oh, I remember: 
there’s your sister. You are to be with her till Miss Voysey 
comes home. You will like that.” 

Her tone was a tone he knew very well. It was the tone 
of their quarrels. A tone that was never without its effect 
upon him — its exasperation for his temper and his nerves. 

“ You are fonder of her than of any one,” she went on. 
“ I don’t believe you would ever care for any one as you do 
for your sister.” 


VOYSEY 


223 


“ Haven’t you your child ? ” But as soon as he had said 
it, he was sorry. There was still one depth below them in 
the abyss of mutual recrimination. “ You have your home 
to go back to,” he added. 

“ I hate it.” 

“ Oh no, it’s not quite that.” 

“ I hate 
“ Ah ! ” 

“You know I do.” 

“Well, lately . . . But at first — until lately, at all 
events . . .” 

“ No, I didn’t at first, I suppose ; but I think I have always 
been waiting to hate him. I believe I have always known I 
should in the end, if anything happened.” 

“ And it has happened with a vengeance,” he moaned. 

“ It doesn’t matter to you.” 

He stared at her. 

“You are free.” 

“ Free ? — in what possible sense ? ” 

“To go home and forget all about it.” 

“ What mockery ! ” he laughed. 

“ Oh, in a month or two . . . when you get back to your 
dear Harley Street.” 

“ Less there than anywhere else in the world ! ” he ex- 
claimed. “It is precisely there one is most certain to 
remember ! ” 

She waited again. There was a momentary lull in the 
storm of her doubts. He saw he had touched her. He saw 
a gleam of the old tenderness return to her face as she watched 
the wretchedness in his — in his, in which, in spite of the 
wretchedness, the warm colour left by the sun reminded her 
of the life they had lived, of the sunshine and the radiance of 
the golden hours of the open-air life of these long, beautiful 
weeks. It was in another tone she said — 


224 


VOYSEY 


“ I have never understood you. I don’t understand you 
now. I suppose I never should. I am not sure that I have 
ever wanted to, really.” 

“Yet it might have been better ” 

“ For you ? Did you want me to ? ” 

“For you, I meant,” he said. 

“ It doesn’t matter. It has been part of it all, as it were — 
your being what you are. It has all been a kind of wonderful 
dream. It hasn’t been like anything real. For, -besides other 
things, you see, one’s being married ” she hesitated. 

“ Makes it seem still less real ? ” 

“Makes it more wonderful. For if' any one cares for one 
then ” 

“ When one’s married ? ” 

“Yes, one feels it must be only because they can’t help it.” 

“ And that is what your feeling has been about my 
love ? ” 

“ That is why you stayed away as you did in London before 
we came here. You thought it wrong.” 

“To care for you ? ” 

“ Because I was married.” 

“And hasn’t our love appeared to you, too, sometimes to 
need some — some little justification ? ” 

“ I don’t think I have ever thought about it. I think it 
justifies everything — a love like that.” 

He turned from the table and began to pace the room. 
After a turn or two, however, he paused, and looking across 
at her, “ Supposing we had been free,” he said ; “ that you 
had not been married, you think our love would not have 
been quite the same thing ? ” 

She shook her head. “ I don’t think it could have been.” 

“ It would have been less — wonderful, you think ? ” 

“ It would have been different.” 

“ One doesn’t know what love is — at least, a woman 


VOYSEY 


225 


doesn’t — until one is married . . . no, that’s not quite 
what you mean ? ” 

“Yes, partly that. And there are so many other things 
in marriage.” 

“ Besides love ? ” 

“Yes, besides love.” 

“ And, at bottom, those are not the things you have always 
wanted. This is what you have wanted : a love like this. Is 
that it ? ” 

“To know one is cared for just simply for oneself in spite 
of everything — everything that stands in the way — just 
simply because you can’t help it. No one I ever knew was 
loved like that ; there were always other things. 1 felt it, I 
knew it from the way people talked. I saw it from the way 
they talked about the future, from the plans they made. The 
men wouldn’t have cared for them if there hadn’t been any 
future j I mean, if they hadn’t been going to have a home 
and all that. But I always knew there was a different kind 
of love, when a man cared for one without thinking about the 
future, without troubling what might happen, or whether he 
would be happy or not. When one was cared for for noth- 
ing else in the world but just simply for oneself, because a 
man loved one passionately, and nothing in the world could 
prevent it.” 

“ And yet you married like the rest ! ” 

“ Oh yes, of course, I know.” 

He turned from her again and went to the window. He 
put the blind a little on one side and stared at the darkness. 
It seemed to him as if there were a strange sound in his ears ; 
it was as if he had been listening to the flow of strong waters 
from the deep wells of unlived life in her. The metaphor 
had almost the effect of an hallucination, so obscure and 
inconsequent had the working of his brain become. The 
lucidity, that was his weapon of defence and his saving power, 
Q 


226 


VOYSEY 


had gone from him j he was conscious of having passed to a 
state of confusion in which, instead of reasons and convic- 
tions, detached images rose before his mental eye. In the 
blank pane of the window he saw again the desolate sky into 
which he had read the portentous menace ; but he saw it now 
as something remote, fantastic, grotesque, absurd even, like 
the remembered menace of a nightmare. Then, suddenly, 
it was as if he were looking at the breaking of light, at the 
joy of a sunrise. He quickly turned from the window. 

For an instant the room looked unfamiliar ; he felt he had 
left it. The feeling, however, passed, and possession of the 
reality returned. 

“ Isn’t it strange,” he said, turning to Emily, “ that we 
should be talking like this ? After what has happened.” 

“ That’s just it ! ” she exclaimed. ‘‘ What is it that has 
happened ? ” With a sudden impulse she rose from the sofa, 
and stepped a pace or two forward, and stood before him. 
“ What is it that has happened ? ” she cried. ‘‘ Here we 
stand, you and I ” 

“ Alone in the night, as one might say ” 

“Alone in the night, you and I. Here we stand face to 
face with one another, and yet ” 

“ It is as if wide waters,” he said, “ had rolled between us.” 

“No,” she demurred. “No, I don’t feel that.” 

“With whole worlds between us,” he added. 

“ No, it is not that. I could understand if it were that. 
But that’s not what I feel.” 

“ What is it you feel then ? ” 

“In some strange way — ” she paused — “we seem to be 
nearer.” 

“ Nearer .? Now, do you mean ? ” 

“Yes, in some strange way.” 

She frightened him. The obscuring of his mental vision 
deepened, as at the troubling approach of the unreal. It was 


VOYSEY 


227 


as if they were beginning to descend to dark and unknown 
places, where mysterious forces, mysterious elements and 
powers, imposed themselves upon the will. The sense of 
his ascendency left him. It was she now who carried the 
light. 

“ It is strange that we should be talking like this, but it 
seems somehow as if one had known all along that we had 
got to talk like this — that this had got to happen. Doesn’t 
it seem so to you ? — as if we had got something over, as it 
were, that had to come ? ” 

“ Got rid of something — that has stood between us ? ” 

“Yes — but something imaginary. Not anything real. 
All this is not real, you know, what we have been saying 
to one another. None of it is real. I know you had to 
feel like this. You never could be happy like any one else 
— there’s something that would always prevent you. I know 
there have been times all along when you have felt strangely 
about me. But I know you care ; I know you love me, love 
me as I love you, darling — passionately — just in that way. 
And there is nothing else in the world that matters. That’s 
the only thing that’s real.” 

Her exaltation, the passion in her white and quivering face, 
had transformed her: that latent, possessive, dominating qual- 
ity he had always known to be there was expressing itself in 
an intense and tragic manifestation of the supreme energy of 
an indomitable love. All sense of power had gone from him. 
The situation was supremely hers. 

“ It has been so good, oh, so good, our love,” she went on, 
moving nearer to him. “ Think of all the brightness, the 
happiness, the wonderfulness of these weeks we have had 
together ! How lovely it has been our being together, always 
together, together all day long. I shall love Morebay as long 
as I live for the sake of this time we have had.” Then, sud- 
denly, still more passionately, she cried ; “ I have never loved 


228 


VOYSEY 


any one else — never, never, never in all my life. I have 
always been different to other people : even as a child I was. 
It seems as if I had always been waiting for this, to love you. 
And I shall love you always till I die: utterly, passionately, 
as only a woman can love — once — just once in her life. 
There, darling, do you understand me now — do you see 
how I love you ? Then take me, my dear one, take me, 
my dear one — you may now, mayn’t you? — and let us be 
happy together.” ) 

She was in his arms. There was a light before his eyes, 
a fierce intoxicating brightness, a light as of a fiery sunrise 
shining far up, upon far-off, unimaginable places. 


PART IV 


I 

Miss Voysey, in her pursuit of the modern idea, had been 
spending a pleasant afternoon. She had betaken herself, soon 
after luncheon — in order to make the most of the short-lived 
November daylight — to a gallery in Pall Mall, where a young 
artist, a friend of her nephew’s, was exhibiting some clever, 
impertinent, ugly little pictures, with an intention of protest 
against the illiberality of the older conventions. A private 
view was an experience dear to Miss Voysey. She liked to 
feel she had escaped for once from membership with the 
general public ; she liked the quickened sense of opportunity 
it gave her, the livelier consciousness of being “ in it ” ; she 
liked the notion that she was moving in a company of people 
of a more or less interesting kind, the kind of people who 
might be considered to contribute to the making of London 
the place it was ; she liked the little fresh air of expectation 
and curiosity she found at a private view ; she almost liked 
the crush. And to-day the experience had gained additional 
zest for her from the pressure of an intellectual difficulty. 
She had had a struggle for the point of view. Certain critics 
in whom she was interested had been saying things about the 
young man’s work which she had been trying for some time 
to understand ; and she had hoped that, with the works before 
her, she would be able to bring her perceptions into harmony 
with the criticisms she had read. In this, unfortunately, she 
had not been successful. The point of view had not been 
revealed to her. She could remember having seen nothing on 

229 


230 


VOYSEY 


land or sea, no changes nor chances of’ colour or light, no 
random effects of rain or shine, of which the pictures on the 
walls could in any way pass for an interpretation. She 
had made so much progress, however, in other directions of 
late, that the discouragement from her failure had not been 
more than momentary ; it had passed with her return to the 
familiar world of the streets outside, where the lamps, like 
early stars, were coming out along the edges of the pavements. 
It had been entirely dissipated by a talk with some people who 
had called a few minutes after she had reached home ; people 
who had not been to the private view, but who had some 
knowledge of the young man’s work ; who took her failure 
lightly, and encouraged her to believe that there were still 
a good many persons, and persons of her kind, too, who pre- 
ferred to have the grass in their pictures painted green and 
their skies reasonably blue. 

And now, alone in the dusky drawing-room — where the 
shaded light of the tall floor-lamp failed to tarnish the crisp 
brightness of the fire, with just a filtering of autumn fog 
perceptible against the shadows at the further end, with the 
muffled sound of the hoofs on the wood pavement coming up 
from the darkness of the street below, after the fatigues and 
emotions of the afternoon, the talk and the crowd and the 
pictures and the lighted streets — Miss Voysey was resting. 
The hour was one of great pleasantness for her. It was an 
hour for the gathering together of many impressions : for 
letting memories and visions of places and people, of sights 
and sounds, of voices and faces, of ideas, conclusions, odds 
and ends of talk, animate and vivify the shadowy seclusion, 
the restful stillness, the homely security of the firelight. Her 
life now was full of so many interests, of so many people, that 
she needed such quiet pauses : needed them not only to 
enable her to do justice to the richness of the present, but to 
save her from a too rapid obliteration of the past. For the 


VOYSEY 


231 


past, even the dreary past of her life at Torquay with her 
querulous mother, presented its claim upon her affections : she 
would have felt it an impiety to use the recollection of the past 
merely to intensify the pleasantness of the present. She still 
kept a belief that the real sanctions of life lay in its deeper 
devotions, and it was only by the piety of her memories that 
she could hope to prevent the contrast between the satisfac- 
tions of her present existence and the tediousness of those 
sterile years, from sometimes wearing an aspect of reproach. 
The present, however, was undeniably pleasant, and to-day 
the pleasanter for her because the hum of the London dusk, 
the hush of the quiet room after the whirl of the London 
crowd, the London talk, had a certain novelty and freshness. 

She had been in London only a fortnight. When Nell had 
left Pontresina with some friends about the middle of Septem- 
ber, Miss Voysey had made her way by Innsbruck and Munich 
and Nuremberg to Dresden, where she had remained a month. 
Dresden delighted her. It was not only that it gave her 
pictures and music and green-roofed buildings, and, as she did 
her shopping in its streets, that pleasurable sense that makes 
the charm of travel — the sense that this was Dresden^ but 
that at her pension (it stood near the Reichs-strasse) she enjoyed 
some very admirable opportunities for conversation. The 
daily talk there was full of great names : of Holbein and 
Raphael and Raphael Mengs, of Wagner and Goethe and 
Schiller and Ibsen, of — her fellow inmates were largely 
American — Mark Twain and Emerson and Howells; and 
though she realized (and with some little poignancy at times) 
that this talk had not quite the quality of some of the talk to 
which of late years she had listened, she doubted at moments 
whether really it mightn’t suit her better. One young Ameri- 
can, with the illimitable good-nature of his people, had often 
offered his services to her, and she had gone with him more 
than once to the Zwinger, and had profited much by his recent 


232 


VOYSEY 


culture. Yet now, in the firelight, in the early fallen darkness 
of the November evening, in memory of these things, of the 
galleries, of the Reichs-strasse, of the busy, asphalted streets 
with their tram-lines, and the shop windows where she had lin- 
gered before the Chocolate-Madchen and the Sistine Madonna, 
and the last additions to the library of Tauchnitz; of the 
Bruhlsche Terrasse and of her other walks by the river, where, 
in the light of late October afternoons, the dingy picturesque- 
ness of the many-windowed, green-shuttered houses had 
seemed as melancholy to her loneliness as the litter of leaves 
under the parapet : now the memory of these things, pleasant 
as at the time they had been to her, served to deepen her con- 
tentment with the present. To a maiden lady who has never 
travelled much, and who speaks no language but her own, 
foreign travel with its uncertainties and its calculations and 
its fatigues is apt to bring almost too stirring a sense of 
adventure ; and to-day Miss Voysey, in her shadowy medita- 
tion upon the experiences of her London afternoon, found her 
delight in those experiences deepened by an underlying satis- 
faction in her return to familiar things ; to the free use of her 
native idiom, to the smooth routine of long-established domes- 
tic ways, to the comfort of having her own things about her, 
to the grace and charm of the easy drawing-room with the 
fellowship of its English fire, and the familiar companionable 
sounds of the hoofs and the footsteps coming up from the 
street below. 

And the pleasantness of the hour was not diminished for 
Miss Voysey when, by and by, her nephew joined her. He 
appeared just as she was thinking of having the tea-things 
cleared away and of replacing them, on her own little table by 
the fire, with NelFs small copper lamp on its iron pedestal ; 
she was quite willing to abandon the yellow-labelled book, to 
which her meditation was about to yield, for the livelier 
pleasures of a talk. 


VOYSEY 


233 


In fact, among the conditions to which she was least 
sorry to have returned, her affection for the young man gave 
him a prominent place ; his companionship, indeed his mere 
presence, was dear to her ; to her tender and favourable eye 
his person, so well did she think his customary frock-coat 
became him, suggested the same discriminate use of leisure 
and opportunity that she discovered in his mental attitude. It 
was a satisfaction to her that her nephew had the right Lon- 
don look. There was an instant quickening of expectation in 
her eager face at the sight of him, though the want of alacrity 
she noticed in his step as he passed from the shadows by the 
door into the firelight, the too evident fatigue of his attitude 
as he leaned for a moment on the chimney-piece and looked 
down at her, subdued the note of her welcome. 

“ You look tired,’’ she said. “ Let me ring for some fresh 
tea for you. We don’t dine for some time. Where have you 
been all the afternoon ? Have you been calling upon people ? ” 

Voysey drew his chair a little nearer to the hearthrug. 
He declined the tea. 

“ No,” he said, “ I have not been calling. I have been 
wandering about : making the most of the dusk and the 
lamplight.” 

“ I am not sure that that sounds very cheerful,” his aunt 
demurred. 

‘‘ No, it is not so snug outside as you have it in here. — 
How did you like the pictures ? ” he asked. 

“ I don’t understand them,” was Miss Voysey’s humble 
admission. 

Herbert laughed. 

“ Do you ? ” 

“ Oh, dear no ! But I like seeing them. I think one 
likes to know that that kind of thing is being done. I expect 
it is really a kind of thing one would like very much — in the 
hands of a stronger man.” 


234 


VOYSEY 


“No, I am afraid I never should,” said Miss Voysey. 

She was sitting upright in her chair ; her fingers were play- 
ing with the thin gold chains that hung from the pin of her 
brooch; she was looking meditatively before her. The fire- 
light touched the smoothness of her hair, which she wore, as 
she had long worn it, without compromise with the passing 
fashion. It was some minutes before either of them spoke. 

“ London is very wonderful,” she said at last, giving, ap- 
parently, the conclusion to which in the interval she had 
come. 

“ Even after Dresden, I suppose.” 

“ Oh, Dresden is wonderful too. But London ” 

“ One is uncommonly glad to come back to it. Even in 
September I was, I know ! ” he averred. 

“Still one feels at times, perhaps, as if there were almost 
too much — too much to keep up with.” 

“Need one try to keep up.? Does it matter if things do 
get ahead a bit ? ” 

“ One ought to be Nell’s age,” Miss Voysey sighed. “ The 
girls of to-day have a wonderful chance.” 

“ There is too much for them too. Their chance is too 
much for them.” 

“ With their opportunities,” she murmured. “ The free- 
dom they enjoy ! ” 

“ It is just the sense of their opportunities that is too much 
for them,” Voysey asserted. “ It weighs them down, it 
depresses them. They don’t enjoy. They are too anxious to 
enjoy. They haven’t time. They work too hard. The life 
they lead is weighted too much with responsibility for enjoy- 
ment. There are too many things ; too much to think of, too 
much to do; too many things of importance. Their exami- 
nations, their opportunities, the sense of this wonderful new 
chance, the sense of what they owe their sex, of what they 
have got to do for it, of what is expected from them, the get- 


VOYSEY 


235 

ting of a proper attitude towards things in general, the world, 
themselves, each other — all this makes a burden of responsi- 
bility, a heavy and a weary weight, that lies perpetually on their 
spirits. It is much too self-conscious a life for enjoyment. 
It takes the blitheness out of them, the joie de vivre^ and it 
imposes a lamentable uniformity.’* 

“ Oh, I don’t know,” Miss Voysey demurred ; “ they have 
ideas.” 

“But not their own — each other’s. They all have the 
same ideas. Their ideas are as much alike as their manners 
— and are not always much more comfortable.” 

“ They have more ideas than we had,” Miss Voysey 
declared. 

“ The thing doesn’t work out as it should ; that’s where it 

is. That’s the pity of it. We have multiplied the opportu- 
nities, but we have not increased the joy. The end is too 
often disappointment. The good time that should come of 

it, doesn’t come. The larger life has a way of working out 
for women mainly as an increased facility for earning a living. 
And unless one is exceptionally good at it, earning a living is 
a dreary business. What they really ask of the larger life, 
what young girls really ask, is happiness, a good time. But 
there’s not enough happiness to go round. A good time 
remains pretty much what it always was : a question of spirits, 
and a question of money.” 

“ But you wouldn’t say this of Nell .? She has a good time. 
No girl could be fonder of her college than she is. Her powers 
of enjoyment, surely, are delightfully fresh and strong?” 

“ Nell has money. No, I wasn’t thinking of Nell. She is 
not typical. She feels her responsibilities as they all do, but 
she manages sometimes to escape from them. She is delight- 
fully expectant and young. I was thinking of the others : the 
clever young girls one knows, one meets, whom she talks to 
one about. But even Nell, I am afraid, will find when she 


236 


VOYSEY 


leaves college she has some blank spaces to fill that it will not 
be very easy to get rid of.’' 

Miss Voysey was silent. She looked into the fire. 

“ I hope she will marry,” she said. 

Voysey laughed. 

Ah, but what of the larger life ? ” 

“ What do you mean ? ” 

“ Isn’t that giving the position away ? ” 

“ I don’t follow you.” 

“To have to fall back upon some one else for one’s happi- 
ness after all — for one’s object in life! What does the 
larger life do for one if it doesn’t give one an object in one- 
self, doesn’t enable one to make oneself happy ? ” 

Miss Voysey looked into the fire again. The turn their 
talk had taken was depressing her. It seemed as if the lights 
were going out. She had great faith in the new chance; a 
great belief that the world was becoming a better place for 
women : and the idea that this hope, like so many others, 
might rest upon illusion after all, gave her a feeling as if a 
great darkness were gathering above her and passing over the 
radiance of her firmament. 

“ But surely marriage is not incompatible with the larger 
life ? ” she reasoned. “ Why shouldn’t one live one’s own 
life in marriage ? ” 

“ Oh, no doubt, one may : but how many of us are there 
who do ? What is this urgent need of some one else to give 
us an object in life, something to live for, to make us happy, 
but an accusation of the void within ? Very few of us have 
any lives of our own to live. Very few of us know what to do 
with ourselves. We make haste to get rid of ourselves. The 
purposelessness of our individual existence is intolerable to 
us. We marry. And this wonderful chance of living that we 
each of us have we give away to our children. They must 
live for us. Life will have a value for them it has not had 


VOYSEY 


237 


for us. They will know what to do with it. And they, in 
their turn, when they grow up, give away the precious thing 
too. They know no more what to do with it than we did. 
And so the living of life gets eternally postponed from one 
generation to another.” 

Happily, Miss Voysey, eager as might be her pursuit of 
modern ideas, had still a firm hold of some of the old 
ones. She still kept that little sense of humour of hers — 
that little sense of proportion, which she owed to the com- 
panionship of her brother. 

“ All the same, you know, I hope you will marry too,” she 
ventured to tell him. 

Voysey moved on his chair. 

“ Oh, I feel the void like the rest,” he laughed. 

“ You could marry any one,” Miss Voysey pursued. 

“ My dear aunt, my modesty ! ” 

“ And there are so many nice girls,” Miss Voysey went 
on. 

“ Let us set to work at once, shall we ? Or shall we be- 
gin with Nell ? ” 

“ She must be clever.” 

“ She is sure to be that. They are all clever. They get 
cleverer and cleverer every day.” 

“And she must be cheerful.” 

“ Poor thing, or with my spirits . . .” 

Miss Voysey leaned forward in her chair a little, and, 
shading her face from the fire with her hand, looked at her 
nephew. 

“ She must have a sense of humour,” she added. 

“ What she would miss in me, dear girl, if she hadn’t ! Ah, 
my dear aunt,” he admonished her, “ but the gods are listening 
to us.” 

“ I hope they are. And I hope they will find a nice girl 
for you who will make you happy.” 


238 


VOYSEY 


He got up from his chair and leaned for a moment against 
the chimney-piece. 

“ If she had my happiness as much at heart as my aunt 
has,” he put his hand tenderly on the kind-hearted little lady’s 
shoulder, “ I shouldn’t do badly, should I ? ” he said. 

“ Oh, I am only an old woman,” said Miss Voysey, draw- 
ing the young man’s hand down to her. 

“ I only wish I were half so young ! ” the young man 
laughed. 

That evening, however, it seemed to Miss Voysey that, 
though her nephew might perhaps live habitually too much in 
the shade for one of his years, there were times when the sun 
of his spirits shone with no inconsiderable brightness. Two or 
three people dined with them that night : not mere acquaint- 
ances, not people they knew as one does know people in 
London, but old intimates, old friends whose friendship was a 
plant that had its roots in the relations of an older generation, 
while it owed the perennial freshness of its flowers to the 
intercourse and sympathies of the present. 

On Miss Voysey’s right hand at dinner that night was a 
Mr. Standen, a man with a neat fair beard, a fresh complexion, 
and a clear eye, who in his younger days (he was still, how- 
ever, just on the bright side of forty) had found in a temporary, 
and one might almost say opportune, affection of the heart a 
pretext for devoting the ample means his father had left him 
to the pursuits of an ingenious leisure. He had chased the 
modern idea, as Miss Voysey knew very well, up and down a 
variety of select opportunities. He had a house in Notting- 
ham Place full of delicate possessions — enamels, intaglios, 
fine bronzes, pictures, old carvings, old books ; and to these 
rare things he had added, with a still finer discrimination, a 
clever and amiable wife. With Mrs. Standen, whom Voysey 
had taken in to dinner, had come her sister, a girl with so 
much charm and sympathy and spirit that Miss Voysey, even 


VOYSEY 


239 


while the dinner was at its lighter courses, had a humorous 
notion that the gods must indeed have been listening to her. 
Miss Anstey, however, had been commended to the attentions 
of Dr. Keen, a Harley Street neighbour of theirs, the son and 
successor of one of Dr. Voysey’s old friends. 

It was a pleasant little gathering, and the flow of the talk 
had the merit of being gracious and free. The Standens had 
been in London a week, and to the freshness that belongs to 
the renewal of intercourse was added that note of a quickened 
interest, of a conscious anticipation, that comes with the 
exchange of a country house and a damp and misty contempla- 
tion of dripping skies and falling leaves for the human horizon 
and the genial proximities recovered in the filling town. For 
a little dinner like this, as indeed for most gatherings that are 
to have any flavour of intimacy, the moment was one of the 
happiest. November can give chances to friendship seldom 
vouchsafed by June. The town was filling, but was far from 
full; even among the people the Voyseys knew, people for 
the most part of but qualified leisure, the circles were still 
incomplete ; and the closing up of the ranks over the gaps of 
the absent draws those who have rallied to the flag nearer and 
into closer bonds : besides, the absent, too, when they are not 
absent too long, are handsome contributors to conversation. 
After the exile of the summer, the hard task of filling days 
nearly every one ends by finding too long, people may come 
very near (for a week or two) to being glad to see one 
another: at all events, they are few persons to whom the 
return to the warm and well-lighted dusk of the homely city 
offers nothing they can promise themselves and expect. 

To Voysey, with his aversion from summer gloamings and 
his preference for lamplight and firelight, the London autumn 
was always welcome ; and the Standens were people he was 
always glad to see. The evening was full of delight for him. 
He loved smooth talk ; talk of the kind to which the custom 


240 


VOYSEY 


of an old intimacy has lent a property of easiness, talk that 
deals in impressions, humours, suggestions, fancies, ideas, and 
avoids facts and explanations, and the too frequent telling of 
stories. His material surroundings, too, the shaded light of 
the candles on the plate and the flowers, the outlying shadow 
over the obscure pictures on the wall, made an appreciable 
contribution to his enjoyment. The weeks that had gone by 
had not so dulled his remembrance of lodging-house high-teas 
that he did not still find a satisfaction in Miss Voysey’s house- 
keeping and in the noiseless vigilance of Nelson. It was an 
hour for him of respite, as it were, of reconciliation, of har- 
mony with life and its finer influences. It was an hour when 
the finer influences might almost have passed for the dominant 
ones ; the mean and the commonplace and the pitiful had 
ceased their horrid proclamation of their universal presence ; 
even into the dark valley of the tragic it seemed as if the sun 
might sometimes shine. This world of ours must have some- 
thing to be said for it, after all, if in it one could procure hours 
of such unquestionable pleasantness. The humour and deli- 
cacy and ease of these clever and kindly women had power to 
banish to an infinite remoteness the crudities and vulgarities 
of the world. They had power to give remoteness, too, to 
moods and experiences of his own : he felt again the heavy 
loss of the man in whose thoughts of women the grosser 
interest prevails over the better comprehension. How deep a 
miscalculation it seemed fatuously to surrender to the estimate 
of the passions the pleasures that come of insight and sympa- 
thy and observation ! There were experiences of his that 
now, in his response to the gracious possession of the hour, 
he found as difficult to realize and recall as were the past 
scenes this room itself had once witnessed : experiences that, 
in his present mood, looked as remote as, to-night, from amid 
the talk and the laughter, the lights and the flowers, appeared 
the weary and silent waiting of those morning groups of his 


VOYSEY 


241 


father’s time ; the waiting, in such joyless expectation, the 
turn to be summoned to the unburdening of the confessional 
in that room beyond the folding-doors. 

It was not Voysey’s custom unduly to prolong the interval 
for the cigarette after the ladies had left the dining-room. But 
to-night he lingered. Standen and the young doctor had met 
before, and had discovered sympathies which the talk this 
evening had tended agreeably to develop ; but it was not by 
the furtherance of a good understanding that Voysey found he 
was detained. If the minutes passed, and the interval was 
lengthened almost to the point of incivility to his guests up- 
stairs, the delay came from his reluctance to face a small 
ordeal that he had reason to believe was awaiting him ; a 
small ordeal that awaited him in the hall, on the hall table, 
that he had reason to suspect the last round of the postman 
would have brought him. 

At length, having made his friends a last offer of the decan- 
ter, he opened the dining-room door for them. His appre- 
hension was justified. On the hall table lay just the letter he 
had expected. He took it up, and having asked the men to 
go on to the drawing-room before him, remained under the 
hall lamp to read it. That the reading of it was an experience 
so unpleasant as to amount to an ordeal the expression of his 
face made probable. His face changed very cruelly. After 
he had finished the letter, he stood for a minute or two in 
dreary meditation, still holding the paper in his hand. Then, 
suddenly, his dejection yielded to a movement of revolt. The 
intrusion of his correspondent upon him just at that moment 
appeared too intolerable j he crushed the paper in his hand, 
and swore. 


R 


II 


As Voysey strolled to the museum at South Kensington to 
keep the appointment Emily had proposed in her letter, it was 
not merely a reluctance for the tryst that made him linger by 
the way, it was also an unwillingness to give up his common 
property in the cheerfulness of the streets, and submit to the 
sense of displacement, of abrupt removal to a strange and 
timeless world, which he knew he would experience across the 
threshold of this house of antiquities and treasures. These 
appointments had been frequent of late, and his impressions 
had grown familiar to him ; little as his visits had to do with 
the purposes of the place, he could never resist the claim it 
made upon his attention ; it never failed of a power to impress 
him, to impart this sense of an abrupt transition. With his 
first step into the first vast hall with its high, terra-cotta- 
coloured walls, and the immense plaster cast of Trajan’s 
column towering to the white square panes of the skylight, 
with its heavy tomb-like smell, the smell of old things in an 
un-aired building, the accumulated smell of a thousand sub- 
stances and fabrics and textures, the treasured lost property of 
the world, he experienced a severance from the living and the 
actual, a feeling of consignment, as it were, to a hushed and 
dusky realm of the crowned and consummated past, where the 
echo of the modern footfall had an effect of profane trespass : 
and it was a feeling from which the lively, and one may almost 
say romantic, nature of his errand had hitherto failed to save 
him. 

After a few minutes’ wandering among the casts, the majestic 
fragments of great inspirations, and a little inspection of the 

242 


VOYSEY 


H3 

brief records on the black labels with their white lettering, he 
returned to the foot of Trajan’s column just as Emily was 
passing under the black and white marble of the rood-loft 
above the entrance. • 

“ Here you are ! ” she said, coming to him. “ I am not 
late, am I ? ” 

“You are not indeed! You are two or three minutes to 
the good.” 

“ I am glad. I had such a scurry to catch the train. After 
lunch I was obliged to go to a shop with nurse to get some- 
thing for baby, and they kept us an age. Have you been here 
long ? ” 

“ Only a few minutes. Where shall we go ? ” he asked. 

“Oh anywhere — where we can sit down.” 

He considered. “ There is nothing you want to see, I 
suppose ? ” 

She laughed. “ Oh no, thank you, Bertie. I have seen it 
all. Once is quite enough. Let’s go where we went last 
time.” 

“To the Raphael Cartoon-room ? ” 

“ Yes ; it’s quiet up there.” 

They left the hall and turned into a dim corridor in which, 
at the darkest point, a point of intersection with another way, 
a crude gas-jet had been lighted. The corridor, which was 
continued as a kind of covered passage through an inner hall 
filled with rows of innumerable glass-cases, led down a long 
perspective of iron grating, over which they passed to the 
accompaniment of the noisy clanking of their footsteps. They 
found the cartoon-room above, with the stretch of red-tiled 
floor, and the skylight to which some tinted glass outside gives 
a curious effect of opalescence, lying grey and silent in its 
emptiness, guarded at the further end by a policeman, who 
was leaning upon the glass-case over a carved, sixteenth- 
century coffer. Emily passed before the great works on the 


244 


VOYSEY 


wall, that had their maroon curtains drawn up above them, to 
the second of the faded Utrecht velvet covered ottomans in 
the middle of the gallery, the one that commands Paul 
Preaching at Athens and The Miraculous Draught of Fishes. 

‘‘Well, Bertie,” she exclaimed, accepting the easy accom- 
modation of the yielding springs, “ and what have you been 
doing ? ” 

“ Since the day before yesterday ? ” 

“ Isn’t that a long time ago ? ” 

He flicked a little dust from his coat. “ I have not done 
very much. What have you been doing ? ” 

“ I never do anything,” she said, “ except with you. I 
was all alone yesterday afternoon. You might have come.” 

“ Isn’t it better, don’t you think, that my visits should be 
spaced a little ? Two days running, and the third time this 
week ” 

“I don’t think it would have mattered. He likes you to 
come.” 

“ I expect, on the whole, this is wiser.” 

“Well, perhaps,” she admitted; “there are the servants. 
But if you would come more often when he’s there ” 

“ Would that go very far to explain my coming when he is 
not?” 

“ No, I suppose you are right : they would see through it 
anyhow. Servants are so sharp.” 

A foreigner with close-cropped hair and a loose tie, a soft 
felt hat in one hand and a red guide-book in the other, came 
into the gallery, and glanced at the walls with an interested 
look of recognition. While he was referring to his guide-book 
before the Death of Ananias.^ there entered a native sightseer 
of the humbler class, dragging a weary, stout woman in his 
wake ; they passed over the tiled floor with a slow shuffling 
step, unobservant of the walls, looking about them with the 
bemused, deprecatory, almost pathetically uncertain air of 


VOYSEY 


245 

people unused to moving and being seen in large buildings : 
they rounded the policeman who was still standing at the 
further end by the glass-case of the coffer, clattered down the 
other side of the gallery and passed out, having paused before 
nothing but one of the old black, carved, walnut-wood chairs 
ranged at intervals between the cartoons. 

Emily had been watching them. “What funny people 
one does see here ! ” she said. “ W^here do they come 
from ? ” 

“ Where about three-fourths of the world come from. 
One used to wonder where the people at Morebay came 
from.” 

“ Ah, our dear Morebay ! ” she responded. “ How lovely 
it was there ! ” 

Voysey said nothing. Regardless of the policeman, Emily 
let one of her hands steal into one of his that was resting on 
the velvet of the ottoman. 

“ I wonder sometimes,” she mused, “ whether we made the 
most of it. One feels, if one had it over again, one wouldn’t 
lose a minute of the time.” 

“ Oh, I think we made the most of it,” he said. 

Some perception of the difference between her tone and his, 
a difference that had been sensible since their meeting, seemed 
now to occur to her. She glanced at his face ; he was looking 
away from her, at the stalwart apostles in the cartoon on the 
left. The Miraculous Draught of Fishes ; she withdrew her hand. 
He understood her discovery, and knew the way it would 
affect her; but he felt incapable of the effort necessary to 
avert it. They were silent for some minutes. The police- 
man at last left the glass-case, and moved with a flat, mechani- 
cal tread down the gallery, and passed, through the open 
swing-doors at the end, out into the gallery beyond. The 
foreigner was still busy with his guide-book and the cartoons, 
to which the greyness of the dusk that was now gathering 


246 


VOYSEY 


below the skylight was beginning to give obscurity and vague- 
ness of colour. 

“ Did those people dine with you last night ? ” Emily asked. 

“The Standens ? Yes, they came. We had a pleasant 
evening.” 

“They are old friends of yours, aren’t they ? ” 

“Our relations are a trifle difficult to unravel. Mr. Stan- 
den’s father, who was interested in the bank in which my 
grandfather (my mother’s father) was a partner, married a 
second cousin of my mother’s, so I suppose if we were clever 
enough to think it out, we should find we were by way of 
being connected.” 

“ You like them, don’t you ? ” 

“ I am very fond of them. Mrs. Standen is a great friend 
of mine.” 

“And Mrs. Standen’s sister came with her ? ” 

“Certainly — Miss Anstey came too.” 

“ She’s very pretty, isn’t she ? ” 

“ Ah, I said she was pretty ? ” 

“ She is, isn’t she ? ” 

Voysey debated. “ Miss Anstey’s everything : a pretty, 
clever, graceful, sympathetic creature, who is very much her 
sister’s sister.” 

But he repented as soon as he had said it. If the bed he 
had made for himself had proved a place of most unrestful 
lying the discomfort was not to be diminished by his assuming 
an ungraceful posture. Nothing was to be gained by irritating 
Emily or provoking her. He regretted the tone he had taken 
just now ; he regretted his failure to respond ; he regretted 
that he had allowed her to make the discovery. He deter- 
mined once more to take up the burden and to carry it — not 
to suffer it ignobly to drag along the ground. 

“ You have not told me yet whether you have heard from 
your mother again,” he inquired, in a different tone. 

“ I heard this morning.” 


VOYSEY 


247 


“ Mrs. Boulger still wishes you to pay her a visit ? ’’ 

“ She wants me to go in a fortnight.’’ 

“ And you have decided ? ” 

Emily turned to him. She noticed, he saw, the changed 
expression in his face, and divined it was a relief to her to 
put away her resentment and accept the change. “ Do you 
think it is likely I am going ? ” she asked. 

“ Just for a few days ” 

She shook her head and smiled. “ No, not even for a few 
days,” she said. 

They talked on, keeping to her interests and avoiding his, 
and he did his best to respond, he did his best to be nice to 
her ; he so sifted the things he said that he excluded every- 
thing with any edge to it^ everything that could grate upon 
her ear; his voice regained something of the accent of the 
lover : but, little by little, the freshness their brief separation 
had given to their meeting died away, and in spite of his 
efforts a silence fell as heavy as the gathering of the shadows 
in the gallery. It was an inevitable, irreparable silence : the 
silence of people who have nothing to say :| the silence of 
people who have nothing but words to unite them, and who, 
when the sound of their voices ceases, pass to different 
spheres, j These silences fell so soon, so inevitably, that 
Voysey had come to consider them the permanent condition 
of their intercourse : what they said to one another was no 
more than a flash of light in the darkness, a momentary 
illumination of the night. 

Emily grew restless. 

“ It is very dismal here,” she said. ‘‘ What horribly depress- 
ing places museums are ! ” 

“ Shall we try that seat near the clock down-stairs ? It will 
be more cheerful perhaps.” 

Emily rose from the ottoman. “Yes, suppose we do: it 
will be rather better than this, I think.” 


VOYSEY 


They left the gallery, which even the foreigner had at last 
deserted, and made their way to one of the halls they had 
crossed before, where the bench near the grey-faced clock with 
the melancholy legend. Passing Away^ was for the moment 
unoccupied. But the gain in cheerfulness was not consider- 
able. The November dusk had hung a veil of greyness and 
obscurity over all the spaciousness of the hall : a wan light 
came through the glass of the skylight above the ornamented 
iron girders of the roof — a wan light in which all colours had 
faded, in which the greens and the blues had passed from the 
Della Robbia ware on the screens and on the walls, and only 
objects with white surfaces showed any distinctness of form. 
Such objects, in the dim, vague sea of the dusk, caught the 
eye like islands of light. Before the clock near which Emily 
and Voysey were sitting, it was the white of a bust and of a 
marble fountain — a fountain graced with the figure of a serene 
little Bacchus with vine leaves crowning his hair ; in weary 
contrast with whom, on the other side, the bowed form of a 
Franciscan friar, praying with uplifted hand for the boon of 
the stigmata, was distinguishable on a relief of white terra- 
cotta ; the white robes of two Byzantine saints shone against 
the shadow of the further wall in the cast of a ninth-century 
mosaic : while the awning drawn in one place across the roof 
seemed to float like a lenient grey cloud above the engulfing 
obscurity, through which the globes of the electric light hung 
down like strange transparent white fruit in the last rays of 
the daylight that touched them. The London twilight was 
giving an infinite melancholy to this dusky realm of the past 
— to these gathered lost treasures of the world, to these relics 
of old faiths and old legends, things that had outlived so long 
the hands that had wrought them, the men and women who 
had lived with and owned, who perchance had once worshipped 
and loved them. 

Again upon Emily and Voysey the silence fell, inevitable. 


VOYSEY 


249 


invincible. Together with the gloom there was a strange 
hush, an absence of voices, a stillness broken by the echo of 
sharp sounds — the sound, it might be, as of something of 
weight being moved in another gallery, the sound of footsteps 
on the tiled floor, the peculiar sharp ring of heels, or the slid- 
ing of a child’s feet, on the iron grating that stretched down 
the whole length of the hall. The grating was continued, in 
dim perspective, along the kind of covered passage that ran 
through the hall beyond. At the beginning of this passage, 
which for darkness was like the mouth of a tunnel, a police- 
man was standing, whose glazed belt, when at intervals he 
crossed to the other side, unexpectedly caught the light : it 
amused Emily to watch the figures emerging from the passage 
and becoming visible with a curious suddenness as they passed 
into the twilight of the hall. 

Their silence, for Voysey, gained an immense power of 
estrangement from his intense consciousness of it. The hour 
and the place impressed him ; the dusk, the hush of the echo- 
ing galleries, the strange contrasts and contacts, the almost 
pathetic promiscuity of all these objects of beauty — the things 
that told of the joy and the pride of life, the ornaments of 
women and of palaces, the jewels, the majolica, the marbles, 
the lanterns that had lighted the wonders of Venetian revels 
in the deep-coloured days of the Renaissance ; and the things 
that told of the pity of life, that proclaimed how widely the 
art of the world has lain under the weight of its shadows, the 
pietas and crucifixions, the sad-eyed madonnas and the mar- 
tyred saints — in his consciousness of the unwisdom of touch- 
ing upon these things, of reminding himself how little humour 
he now found in Emily’s limitations, their silence became an 
opportunity for sounding the depth of the implacable gulf that 
divided them. 

The shadows deepened in the gallery ; the globes of the 
electric light scarcely detached themselves from the dusk; 


250 


VOYSEY 


the rising tide of the twilight passed over the islands of white ; 
the only points of light left in the ocean of dimness were stray 
gleams which a gas-jet, that had been lighted at the mouth of 
the passage, threw on to one of the glass-cases on a screen. 
In his response to the melancholy of the hour and the sugges- 
tions of the place it was only his large common-sense that 
saved Voysey from a movement of egregious self-pity. His 
common-sense, and, it may happily be added, his sense of the 
pitifulness of his adventure. He saw himself as a sinner of 
an altogether unheroic kind, his story as another of the lament- 
able love stories of the suburbs. And still this afternoon, as 
he thought of it, in the hush of the twilight, in the silence 
that the presence of the woman beside him made so oppres- 
sive, it did stand out with clearness that the misery of these 
weeks had been great. And he had not suffered the less 
because, through all he had endured in the weeks that had 
followed his return to London/ he had seldom quite lost his 
balance ; had seldom quite lost his .desire to do justice to the 
situation, his desire to be able mentally to realize it. ^Intelli- 
gence with him was more persistent than emotion, the instinct 
of criticism and analysis lay deeper than any of his passions./ 
And the misery had not been the less because that element of 
the unheroic, of which he was so conscious, had played so 
large a part in the adventure, because so much of what he had 
endured belonged to the comedy of things. The misery of 
the mere inconvenience had been great, of the perpetual de- 
rangement of his habits. It had been a life of manacles and 
fetters. Two clear days to himself was the furthest limit to 
which Emily ever permitted his chain to run out. She was 
perpetually tugging at it, this chain, so to speak, by means of 
the telegraph-boy and the postman. Those humble servants 
of our convenience had acquired for him the aspect of minis- 
ters of fate. He could never count on the morrow : she 
made havoc of his engagements, his occupations, his amuse- 


VOYSEY 


251 


ments, by her incessant demands for his attendance. Oh, the 
weariness of those interminable journeys on the Underground, 
of those interminable afternoons at the villa ! Upon each of 
Emily’s poor little treasures, upon each of those poor little 
possessions she had picked up from amid the fatalities of the 
cheap bazaars, he bestowed an individual and proportioned 
detestation. The palm behind the sofa irritated him by its 
flourishing air of unconscious futility ; the quaintness of the 
diamond-paned window began to get upon his nerves almost 
before he had closed the gate in the garden palings ; he found 
an unfailing provocation in the preposterous colour of the 
door. That she didn’t amuse him would have mattered so 
little, if only upon occasion he could have amused her : but 
Emily was never amused ; she had no interests, no sympathies, 
no intelligent curiosity — she had nothing but an eternal de- 
mand for sentiment. There were moments of desperation 
and revolt in which he declared that, whatever his sins might 
have been, to be bound to a woman with so abysmal a 
deficiency of humour was a quite sufficient punishment 
for them. He was so pitiably, so cruelly and utterly, bored. 
But in all this, fortunately, in spite of the weariness and 
exasperation, he recognized the elements of comedy ; it 
was under another of its aspects that he found the situation 
tragic. The terror of it lay, more than in anything else, in 
this — in the revelations of their deepening intimacy. It was 
not a void he was engaged in sounding, but a deep place full 
of horrors and disgusts. For the moment, however, it is not 
our purpose to place on record these particular results of his 
moral plumbing; for at this point, as it happened, Emily, 
upon whom the silence had begun to weigh, interrupted these 
unhappy meditations of her lover — meditations in which, alas ! 
there was so sadly little of a lover’s kindness for herself. 

“ It’s as bad down here as it was up-stairs,” she declared. 
“ I do think museums are the most dismal places I know.” 


252 


VOYSEY 


“ One sees more boredom here in five minutes/’ he responded, 
“ than anywhere else in a year. Still, this place suits our pur- 
pose, I suppose. It gives us somewhere to sit down.” 

‘‘ Yes, there is that,” she said ; “ one can’t walk about the 
whole afternoon. I wish they would light the lights,” she 
added. 

“ They will very soon, I expect. The men with the lanterns 
passed through some minutes ago. That means that lighting- 
up time is not far off.” 

And, as he spoke, in fulfilment of his conjecture, the sound 
of a sudden hiss and sputter came from the roof, and in the 
great white globes that hung down between the girders and the 
rods of the disused gas-jets there appeared points of an intense 
blue brilliance, which widened out into a harsh illumination 
that restored, though with something, as it were, of a wan 
reserve, their colours to the reliefs and medallions on the 
screens. 

Voysey, whom, be it said to his credit, the knowledge of 
what he could not give was constantly urging to give what he 
could, took up his burden again. He really wished to be nice 
to her. Unfortunately, it was a feature of their silence that 
when it had lasted some little time, he felt a repugnance to 
breaking it. Whatever he might say, he knew her response 
would jar upon him. If he spoke of his friends, he would 
irritate her ; if he talked of the things that were dear to him, 
of what he had seen or read or heard, her want of intelligence 
would spread a waste, a waste and desolation of banalite ; the 
popular verdict never failed of endorsement by her ; she stood 
for him as the explanation of the popular success, she illus- 
trated the crudity of the public taste. If he tried to amuse 
her, she would extinguish his laughter with her eternal demand 
for sentiment. Theirs was the silence that is the cul de sac of 
speech, the place from which there is no way out, the dismal 
place of blank, dead walls. And yet he would cling to it as 


VOYSEY 


253 


to a kind of refuge, and would shrink, almost in terror, from 
the moment when he knew it would cease to shelter him. 
There were times when he shrank from the sound of her 
voice as one shrinks from a touch on a wound; when the 
mere words she used, her phrases, her idioms, her little slips 
in grammar, affected him in a way that was altogether puerile 
and absurd ; when to hear her say different to instead of dif- 
ferent from was like the scratching of silk or the grinding of a 
child’s slate-pencil. 

Still he made the effort ; he did what he could, and an end 
must come even to the weariest of weary afternoons — even 
to an afternoon in a museum. 

“ Well,” she said, when they had left the seat near the clock 
and, to gain the entrance, were making their way among the 
majestic casts in the first hall, “you will come to-morrow 
afternoon ? I know he won’t be back from the Atkinsons’ 
till nearly seven. He’ll never think you knew he’d be out. 
He always expects you on Sunday. And come early, won’t 
you ? ” 

His old humour leapt up. Was it credible that human 
toleration of dulness could be carried to such a length as this ? 
After an afternoon in which he had provided her with such 
lamentable entertainment was it conceivable she could wish 
for another ? 

“ Yes, I will come,” he said. 

“ It is so much nicer at home,” she reflected. Then, look- 
ing at him with a look whose meaning he understood so much 
too well, she added, “Our sofa, you know — it’s rather nicer 
than these benches, isn’t it ? ” 

The end of afternoons like this was the tea he procured for 
her in a confectioner’s shop near the station : a place lighted 
with the green brilliance of incandescent gas, where a crowd 
of persons, who had a straitened air of weariness and unsuccess, 
gathered about marble-topped little tables, and received from 


254 


VOYSEY 


the hands of tired, jaded-looking girls numbered checks for 
presentation at a desk. They passed through the swing-doors 
of the museum out into the autumn dark. The feeling of 
recovered freedom that came to Voysey with the touch of the 
night air, with his sense of restoration to the world, the liv- 
ing interested world with the roar and the lights of its traffic, 
was a feeling of infinite pleasantness. It was pleasant once 
more to have become one of the crowd, to be tramping the 
damp pavement, tasting the keen air, to be once more in the 
populous darkness amid the movement of the London thorough- 
fare, — where the lamps were drawfing diagonal bars of black- 
ness across the evening fog, and the bicycle-lights made little 
red and green stars as they swam among the shadows and the 
vague but massive outlines in the roadway. 


Ill 


If none of our relations, perhaps, are ever quite simple, it is 
not much wonder that the relations between a man and woman, 
who have troubled the waters of life by a tremendous plunge 
into its complexities, should wear many aspects and pass 
through many phases without attaining to anything like con- 
ditions of permanence. As the weeks went by, there were 
scarcely two days when the relations between Emily and 
Voysey could have been covered by just the same definition. 
There was a perpetual play of changing light upon the surface, 
and below the surface there were the stealthy shiftings of a 
current of an unmeasured force and direction. 

The weeks had moved on till the world was beginning to 
feel the first beating of the quickened activity of Christmas. 
Emily’s more stirring preoccupations had interfered curiously 
little with the punctuality of her domestic ways : imagination, 
of a kind, was strong in her, and emotion was strong ; but her 
nature was as material as it was passionate, and her instinct 
for comfort, her love of her ‘‘ things,” her satisfaction in the 
smoothness of habit, her constitutional incapacity, perhaps, for 
more than a certain measure of deviation from the familiar and 
accustomed, had ensured her keeping a regulating hand upon 
the motions of the domestic machinery. The wheels of the 
villa still revolved with considerable evenness and freedom. 
And just now the approach of Christmas, as Voysey perceived, 
seemed to have a good deal of meaning for her; she was busy 
with a number of small preparations — little pleasant arrange- 
ments that had for their centre the imaginary anticipation of 

255 


256 


VOYSEY 


the child, the indifference of whose tender years to times 
and seasons Emily refused, in a pretty motherly way, to 
admit. 

She had already bought for him, though the great occasion 
still lay some weeks ahead, a big lamb with a firm fluffy coat 
and a nose too black for nature ; this arrived one afternoon 
just when Ellen had brought in the lamp, and drawn the 
wicker-table for the tea-things within Emily’s reach from the 
sofa. The lamb’s nose, that protruded from the paper, proved 
an incitement to further discovery ; Emily took a knife from 
one of the under ledges of the table, cut the string, and held 
forth her purchase for Voysey’s admiration. 

“ Won’t he be pleased with it ! ” she cried. “ Isn’t it a 
splendid creature ! ” 

“ Splendid ! ” he rejoined. “ But he’d get just as much 
fun out of a teaspoon ! ” 

Emily was indignant. In her pleasure in anticipating the 
child’s delight, she was half-playing with the lamb herself. 
She stroked its fluffy coat, patted its black nose, laughed at 
the meagreness of its tail. At last, with a little help from one 
of the big cushions by her side, she contrived to make it stand 
upon the sofa. Then with a sudden impulse of apology, the 
curious prompting to atonement that he often noticed in her 
after any special display of affection for the child, she turned 
to Voysey, and smiled, as if she wished him to understand the 
diversion of her affection would go no further. She rose from 
her place under pretence of stirring the fire ; on her way back 
to the sofa, she paused by Voysey’s chair, stooped, and kissed 
him on the forehead. 

She put her hands on his shoulders and looked at him. 
“You have tied your tie crossways again,” she said. “I like 
it. Why don’t you always do it like that ? ” 

He offered some small explanation. 

She kissed him again. “ He is a dear old thing,” she said. 


VOYSEY 


257 


tenderly, still leaning over and smiling at him. “ He always 
looks nice — doesn’t he ? ” 

Voysey drew her down to him and kissed her. But sud- 
denly, releasing herself, she moved away a little and exclaimed, 
“ I had quite forgotten ! Do you notice any difference in the 
room ? ” 

He glanced round. “ Something new, do you mean ? Or 
something you have taken away ? ” 

“ Look. Don’t you see ? ” 

“ No, I don’t notice anything.” 

“ On the piano.” 

Voysey looked at the piano. A sudden recollection came 
to him. “ Ah, the photograph,” he said. 

‘‘ Yes, I have put it away.” 

Voysey moved on his chair uneasily. 

“We don’t want him here — when he’s not — do we? 
We don’t want him always looking at us. Caesar is now 
reposing at the bottom of a drawer over there.” She nodded 
in the direction of a table on the other side of the room. 

Voysey winced. In a moment of levity he had since 
much regretted, he had betrayed Arthur’s old nickname. 
“ Ah, it’s all very well . . .” 

“ But we don’t want him here, do we ? ” 

“Not, perhaps, just at this moment,” he laughed. 

She was leaning over his chair again : she stooped once 
more and kissed him. She put her hand on his hair. “ I 
have got the only person I want,” she murmured. “ I only 
wish I could have him always.” 

Just at that moment, however, the noise of the gate, which 
some one who had come into the garden had suffered to fall 
to and bang against the wooden palings, made an unexpected 
interruption : Emily started back from his chair. 

“ It can’t be . . . already ? ” Voysey exclaimed. 

“ No, it is not likely. He never gets home before seven.” 


258 


VOYSEY 


She glanced at the window, where the curtain had not been 
drawn. A moment's deliberation reassured her. “It’s all 
right,” she said. “ You can’t see in from the palings. You 
can’t at all unless you come upon the grass. No one would 
do that in the dark. Besides, they hadn’t time.” 

After an interval, as if in the obscurity of the porch the 
visitor had found the button diiBcult to discover, came the 
insistent summons of the electric bell. They heard the ser- 
vant go down the passage. 

Emily opened the drawing-room door. “ Not at home,” she 
whispered to Ellen. 

She came back to the fire-place. 

“ Was that exactly wise ? ” Voysey suggested. 

“You mean they will see a light in the room ? ” 

“Yes, there’s that, of course: but I was thinking of Ellen.” 

Emily stooped and stirred the fire. 

“ I don’t care,” she protested. “ I won’t have our time 
together spoilt. I shan’t see you to-morrow. ’ 

Nevertheless, her perception of the wisdom of his caution 
was sufficient to make her restless : she stepped into the hall 
and intercepted Ellen as soon as the front-door had been closed. 
The caller proved to be no one of more importance than an 
agent canvassing for a tea. 

Emily returned to the small wicker-table near the sofa. 
She helped herself to cake, and then, with her cup in her 
hand, sank back once more among the cushions. Voysey 
saw that the episode, which was of a kind he disliked acutely, 
had caused her but momentary concern. This reflection, or 
something perhaps in her attitude that was at once so familiar 
and yet to his eye so suggestive of a subtle difference, made 
him recall an impression upon which he had dwelt a good deal 
of late — the impression of how profoundly their relations had 
changed her. Her face had changed ; she was handsomer : 
her expression was happier, brighter, more intelligent ; it had 


VOYSEY 


259 

gained an assurance, a decision, that went admirably with the 
particular mould of her features. A little more definiteness of 
expression was just what the firmness of her features needed. 
And this increase of assurance was more evident still in her 
manner, — in her movements, in those little unconscious 
energies and spontaneities of gesture, from which, more surely 
than from manner, that is often little more than an indication 
of taste, development in a personality may be inferred. He 
fancied he had noticed something of this a few minutes before 
in the resolute way in which she had dealt with their small 
emergency : the change had defined itself with precision the 
last time she had called upon his aunt. Just at first, at the 
moment of her entering the drawing-room, in which some 
other callers had made a small group, he had detected the old 
shyness, the want of ease that used to give her bearing so 
uncomfortable an appearance of rigidity ; but this had passed 
with startling suddenness ; in a few minutes she had recovered 
herself, had taken her place, had established herself, and was 
even making a certain impression upon the others — though 
an impression, no doubt, that was not very favourable, for 
Voysey attributed the peculiar shade of deference with which 
the other women treated her to the discretion of a latent hos- 
tility. Her self-possession at present did no more than remove 
what had been an obvious defect in her; but he suspected 
that one day it might pass into the rather coarse self-assertion 
of the woman who is too conscious of success with men. The 
change was one that did not altogether escape Miss Voysey : 

but she hardly knew what to make of it. Her first impulse 

was to declare Mrs. Detmond improved ; a little later, however, 
there stole into her mind a vague uneasiness, an intangible 
dread of developments that appeared to give a new meaning 
to her nephew’s old reservations. It occurred to her that it 
was not inconceivable he had been justified in recommending 
the acquaintance tentatively. Mrs. Detmond might possibly 


26 o 


VOYSEY 


belong, Miss Voysey conjectured (and it was a conjecture for 
which her own good-breeding rebuked her), to the class of 
persons who give one that uncomfortable form of anxiety — a 
dread lest one day they may “ come out.” 

Emily had finished her tea. 

“ Come and sit here, Bertie,” she said, moving the lamb 
from the cushion to make a place for him. “ I want to talk 
to you.” 

He accepted the invitation and seated himself on the sofa, 
under the pointing fingers of the palm. 

‘‘ I have heard again from my mother. They seem now,” 
she spoke with some hesitation, “ to want me to go for the 
New Year.” 

He found the hesitation not very hard to explain. 

‘‘ And you feel you are rather coming to the end of your 
excuses,” he suggested. ‘‘I suppose you will all go — Arthur 
and the boy too.” 

Emily smiled : that little twitching at the corners of her 
mouth, which in these days often came when she smiled, he 
now interpreted, in the deep assurance of happiness and 
success her person conveyed, as an indication not so much 
of emotional tendencies as of a kind of fine but unconscious 
irony. She had gained, in a small way and with regard to 
small matters, a new quickness of intelligence, a power, it 
might be, of following up little ideas of her own, a power per- 
haps of one day so taking the initiative upon occasion as to 
secure some small revenge for his old estimate of her capacity. 
He sometimes fancied he divined in a smile or a look some- 
thing that seemed to hint at the possibility of an ultimate 
turning of the tables. 

“No, he can’t,” she said. “ He can’t get away. Besides, 
he has to go to Liverpool on business on the 28th. My 
mother wants me to go to them on the 29th. He will stay 
at Liverpool two nights.” 


VOYSEY 


261 


She was still smiling, and he saw that the significance of 
these dates was to be taken as accountable for her smile. He 
expected her to explain. But as it was evident that she was 
waiting for him to make some reply, he said, having no direct 
comment to offer, “ Well, do you know, I have had an invi- 
tation for the 28th too.’’ 

« Who from?” 

“ Some people at Pinner. Some people who are talking of 
getting up a play, and want me to do a little stage manage- 
ment for them and so on. With the usual modesty of 
amateurs, they have pounced upon Th£ Rivals. The Rivals 
happens to be running at one of the theatres just now. My 
friends have taken places for it on the 28th (they ought to be 
good ones I) and want me to go to it with them, and go down 
to Pinner that night when it’s over, to be ready for a rehearsal 
next day.” 

‘‘ And you have accepted ? ” 

“ No, I have not answered the note yet. But if you are 
going to Heckingden on the 29th ” 

“Who are these people ? Tell me about them. Are there 
any girls ? ” 

“ Two. There are two daughters and a son.” 

“ Are they pretty ? Tell me about them. What is their 
name ? ” 

Among Voysey’s smaller conceits was a belief that he had a 
little gift for personal description ; he had no dislike, at all 
events, to trying to-extract the points of general interest from 
the characters of particular acquaintance : but the motive of 
Emily’s inquiries, the perpetual distrust, the perpetual jealousy, 
moved him to irritation and impatience. He was annoyed by 
seeing the bloom brushed off an intercourse with women, who 
were often women of much distinction and charm, by the 
hand of a crude suspicion. There was a vulgarity in her 
questions that jarred upon him ; she provoked a disagreeable 


262 


VOYSEY 


contrast. Still to quarrel with her was to include himself in 
the same charge, and this, provided his nerves were fairly 
reasonable, he usually managed to avoid. He described the 
people at Pinner, and, to ease his annoyance, tried to make 
his portraits as amusing as if it had been likely Emily would 
appreciate their felicity. 

But Emily did not appreciate their felicity. She was not 
fond of these little displays of cleverness. His humour had 
an effect of estrangement for her. When he laughed she 
seemed to be losing him. She was silent for some minutes. 
At last, “ I thought you would have missed me while I was 
away,’’ she murmured. 

He was silent too. 

“ I suppose there will be a lot of rehearsals ? ” 

“ I hope so, for their sake ! The Rivals at all. . . . But 
The Rivals insufficiently rehearsed. . . . Heaven help us ! ” 

“No, I don’t think it is nice of you,” she said. 

His temper gave way. “ Ah, this is unreasonable,” he 
exclaimed. “ As if I cared two straws for a thing like this ! 
But you shall have your way : I will write to the people 
to-night, and tell them I can’t manage it.” 

When she saw he was thoroughly provoked, she usually 
relented. She put out her hand, and drew him towards her. 
“ No, you had better not do that,” she said. “ But it is 
rather unfortunate it should be that day. I had a little plan 
for that evening.” 

He accepted the reconciliation. “ Tell me what it was,” 
he said. 

She had drawn him quite close to her. She let her head 
drop on his shoulder. “ A little plan for that evening,” she 
repeated. “ I don’t know whether you would have cared for 
it : perhaps you wouldn’t ; I thought it would be rather nice. 
I told you Arthur goes to Liverpool on the 28th. I thought 
perhaps we might spend that evening together.” 


VOYSEY 


263 


“You mean, that I might have dined with you?” 

“ Yes.” 

“ But surely ” he was beginning. 

“ No, not down here,” she interposed : “ in town, I 

meant.” 

Voysey debated. He felt he was not quite prepared for 
this little plan. 

“ Mightn’t it have been rather nice, don’t you think ? ” 

“ Capital ! If, that is — if you didn’t object to running 
any little risk there might be.” 

“ There wouldn’t be any. I could manage it quite easily. 
He’d never know.” 

Voysey found himself gazing blankly in the direction of the 
window, where (for the room was dim and in shadow beyond 
the circle of the shaded lamp) he caught the gleam of the 
bright blurred lights of a train on the embankment in a little 
patch of the diamond panes. The project seemed to him lament- 
able. What the situation required, if he was ever to become 
in any way reconciled to it, was, as he often realized with 
a kind of half-humorous dismay, that he should accept it 
once for all, should swallow it whole as it were, and never 
suffer himself to distinguish particular ill-flavours : but so far 
was he from this, that each new deception brought him a new 
disgust. He could never respond to these little projects of 
hers, never find any pleasure in the thought of them. And 
this alone, without any of the other discrepancies, was enough 
to make their relations impossible. His regret, however, for 
this inability of his, and a certain sense of the logic of the 
situation, had the effect to-day that they usually had: — they 
hastened his acceptance of the proposal. 

“We will have our little dinner,” he declared, in a tone 
to which he even managed to impart some hilarity. “ I shall 
let The Rivals alone.” 

Emily was delighted. She was as pleased as a child. She 


264 


VOYSEY 


caressed and kissed him ; she drew upon the store of little 
endearments, the little playful and tender inventions, the love 
of these months had taught her. She did her best to be good 
to him — to please him, to soothe him, to make him happy, to 
make him live in the passing moment and forget the exactions 
of her jealousy. In order to atone for those exactions of a 
few minutes before she would only let him decline half his 
friends’ invitation : he must give up the theatre, of course, 
to enable them to dine together, but she insisted upon his 
going down to Pinner that night, after their dinner, with these 
people all the same. This would be quite easy to manage. 
Indeed she showed herself full of resource. And so, for half 
an hour, things between them stood pretty much at their best. 
All the unsightly and unseemly elements in their intercourse 
were covered for the moment by the rising flow of the surging 
waters of her love. It was like the merciful sweep of the 
incoming tide as it washes over the muddy and malodorous 
flats of a waste and desolate shore. The dreariness and stag- 
nation were lost to view : in their place were radiance and 
depth, and the roll of an ocean of passion. 


IV 


There are times when the aspect of London for most 
persons of imagination, even though they have long been 
familiar with it, grows lurid, sinister, fateful. It may be an 
effect of mere depression ; it may be a mere effect of the 
gathering dusk, of some sombre incident in a darkening sky, 
but there are times when, in a sense other than the poet’s, the 
world is too much with us, this world of vast and lurid possi- 
bilities, and we lose as it were our nerve. Observation fails 
us ; the old outlines grow blurred ; the old sights and sounds, 
the streets with their misty perspectives, the crossing lines of 
the gas-lamps, the beat and throb of the traffic, the passing 
faces on the pavement, lose their separateness and become 
merged in one immense impression of an immeasurable 
Too Much, an impression charged with menace. Our sense 
of individual security, our faith in our own continued exemp- 
tion from the worst, yields to an overwhelming sense of the 
vast opportunity for misfortune. There seems to be too much 
of everything : this portentous accumulation of life, of moral 
and material forces, of human demands, of human passions 
and desires, seems to be putting too tremendous a strain upon 
destiny. And, as the weight on our spirit grows heavier, our 
isolation in the crowd takes the still darker hue of desolation : 
the familiar miseries of the streets speak to us ; it no longer 
keeps its distance, this outcast wretchedness and this shabby 
despair, it approaches us, walks by our side, looks us in the 
face, appears almost to be claiming us. Our dejection loses 
the largeness of its prophetic quality, and becomes nearly 

265 


266 


VOYSEY 


private and personal : what need to wait for the doom of the 
city, when the opportunities for individual disaster are so 
many! The sense of these opportunities haunts us like a 
conscious presence : a real but invisible presence in which 
there is a menace for us like the menace in the sound of a 
dogging footstep in the dark. 

As the days went by, Voysey, upon whose temperament, 
upon whose imagination and nerves, the wear of his relations 
with Emily was beginning to tell, discovered, when the winter 
afternoons closed in, that some such lurid impressions as these 
were becoming almost habitual. Since that last call at Bed- 
ford Park upon which we followed him, these relations of 
theirs had passed into a new phase. Emily had grown rest- 
less. She, who had been so little given to exertion, who had 
always made somewhere to sit down ” a primary condition 
for their meeting-places, showed now a singular fondness for 
wandering. She would hear no more of the dusky museum : 
the depression of it altogether outweighed the convenience : 
she would not hear of any of the similar places Voysey’s con- 
sideration proposed to her. And, at the same time, she was 
more ready to recognize the wisdom of his visits to the villa 
being spaced. It was for walks now that they made their 
appointments ; once or twice Emily met him at the station at 
Bedford Park, and they spent the afternoon wandering among the 
little that remains of the picturesqueness of Chiswick, a region 
of old brick houses, and of passages between high garden-walls, 
and of queer little streets that seem to be baffled by the river. 
But it was more often at Portland Road that they met : and 
they more often spent the afternoon wandering in the streets 
of the great shops, in the streets in which the recognition of 
the names over some of the shops was a perpetual amusement 
to Emily, to whom the common features of London were as 
unfamiliar still as its conveniences were still unmanageable. 
They spent the afternoon wandering among the Christmas 


VOYSEY 267 

crowd down the lighted ways of Oxford Street and Bond Street 
and Piccadilly. 

“ How you have changed ! ’’ Voysey said to her once. “ I 
believe London has won another victory.” 

Emily smiled. “ I don’t dislike it as much as I used to.” 

“ I believe you don’t dislike it at all.” 

“ It makes it so different having some one to go about with ; 
not having to bother about anything — getting ’buses and 
things. You are splendid to go about with, you know,” she 
assured him. 

“ I hope,” he laughed, “ I can find my way down Piccadilly.” 

‘‘You can anywhere. I believe you know the whole of 
it.” A moment later she added, in a different tone, a tone 
that was at once a reference to the past and an accusation, 
“ One has always something to look at up here.” 

There was, he suspected, a good deal in this ; he often 
feared she had had more to endure in the weary museum than 
at the time he had adequately realized. He believed having 
things to look at, when the things were brilliant shop-windows, 
counted indeed for very much with her. And it was not 
likely that the opportunities for entering the shops which he 
was often careful to provide should diminish the excitement 
of the windows. He seldom let her go home empty-handed : 
on most days it might be nothing but a little purchase of 
flowers ; but now and again it would be a little present, not 
from the shops with these brilliant displays, but from one of 
those establishments, the reticence of whose windows implies 
the offer of realities so superb within that Emily, who had no 
looseness of idea about the prices of things, found it difficult 
to enter them without some small flutter of adventure. 

“ You are awfully good to me,” she said to him after one 
of these exciting little entrances ; “ I don’t know what you 
wouldn’t do if I asked you ! ” 

“ But you didn’t ask,” he declared. “ That little idea,” he 


268 


VOYSEY 


nodded at the diminutive packet that hung from her finger, 
“ was mine.” 

“Yes, I know; that’s what is so awfully good of you. 
You always think of things.” 

“ Oh, a happy thought now and then ” 

“ No, it’s more than now and then,” she said. “ It’s very 
often. And they are always the most lovely things. I have 
never dreamt of having such things.” 

“ Oh, well, so long as it is something you like ” 

Still, as he very well knew, it was neither the pleasure of 
having things to look at, nor even the more stirring pleasure 
of having things to buy, that quite explained her new inclina- 
tion. He divined another motive at the back of it. The 
point towards which she was pressing did for some time elude 
his discernment, but at last from little incidents in their 
wanderings, little comments, small curiosities, from such 
things as one infers from a silence or a look, he gained an 
idea of the direction in which the current was setting. And 
there was a particular afternoon when the many impressions 
gathered themselves together with the force of a definite intui- 
tion. While she was having tea (a little chance for a rest he 
seldom suffered her to miss), she decided to abandon her return 
ticket from Portland Road and take the train at Victoria. 
When they left the shop and turned again into Piccadilly, it 
was all but dark. There was a deepening mystery of green 
above the blurred, smoky glow in the western sky, and there 
was still day enough to make the lamps stand out yellow and 
distinct against the grey blue gathering of the London mist ; 
but at the moment of their reaching the Green Park, before 
they had moved ten yards from the railings, the dusk shifted 
suddenly to dark. Emily took his arm. From over the open 
space, the stretch of misty dampness lying upon the paths and 
grass, a cooler air seemed to meet them ; through the winter 
trees the lamps beyond the Park, on Constitution Hill, in the 


VOYSEY 


269 


Mall, about Buckingham Palace, made a clustered innumer- 
able red twinkling; as they drew away from Piccadilly the 
roar of the traffic behind quickly diminished to a duller and 
more muffled booming. The transition to comparative quiet, 
to comparative solitude, had something of the suddenness of 
that last fall and final obliteration of the darkness. 

The effect upon Voysey of this sudden transition, of the 
cessation of the stream of faces, of this momentary detachment 
from the crowd, was to deepen his sense of the imminence of 
the city. His imagination responded to the darkness, it took 
advantage of the pause. The crowd, as one might say, came 
nearer to him. The passing faces they had left were passing 
still ; the people they had met upon the pavement were still there, 

— more intensely, more intimately, more essentially there, 
now as an abstraction, a memory, an impression, than when 
they had possessed his bodily eye. They seemed now to be 
giving up their secret, acknowledging their purpose, confessing 

— this was the turn his imagination took — the shame of the 
occasion they sought. With the lighting of the lamps, with 
the fall of the darkness, the streets they had been wandering 
in, streets the city wears as the very crown of its civilized 
energy, had become places where civilization mocks itself, 
and, nightly, suffers its supreme defeat : where the depravity 
that saunters and incites, expectant of fortuitous encounters, 
is but a part of the great violation, of the triumph of instinct 
in its manifold propensities over the sanctions and restraints 
of society. They had become places towards which, under 
the provocation of the boundless opportunity, a whole world 
of transgression gravitates : not merely the branded vices that 
flaunt and proclaim themselves under the gas-lamps, but the 
secret and perfidious pleasures of countless undiscovered, un- 
suspected, domestic deceptions and infidelities. And it came 
suddenly home to Voysey that this new phase in their rela- 
tions, her restlessness, their wanderings, needed no further 


270 


VOYSEY 


explanation. In this crowd Emily and he had their place. 
The new phase lost all appearance of accident ; it was the 
pressure of the inevitable that had guided their footsteps — 
they were merely doing as the others. They had joined the 
procession on the pavements because they, too, had part in its 
purpose; because they, too, had felt the provocation of the 
opportunity, and, like the others, needed the impunity the 
city could give. 

It was then that the aspect of London, the common night 
aspect of the streets, those fervid streets he had loved so well, 
grew lurid to Voysey, and those things round which his imagi- 
nation had so often played — played, it must be confessed, 
with an appreciation often not without cynicism and perver- 
sity, seemed bent upon having their revenge. The miseries 
and abominations, of which his delight in the mystery and 
romance and irony of the city, its colossal presentation of life, 
the immensity of its tragic interest, had made him so much 
too tolerant hitherto, now proclaimed that tolerance to be a 
monstrous egotism. His sense of his own part in the play 
made the interest of its vicissitudes too terrible, brought the 
shock of the catastrophe too near. . . . These impressions, 
however, though imagination was perpetually heightening 
them, made as it were but the mental atmosphere of their 
wanderings, the permanent background of which he became 
conscious in the pauses of active observation. He had much 
to observe ; — and, to all of it, that intuition gave him the 
clue. What struck him most, what indeed gave him the 
principal material upon which his own observation worked, 
was the way in which Emily was observing too. With the 
new phase had come a new curiosity ; she, too, was aware of 
the crowd ; to her, too, appeared to have come some stray 
hint as to its secret intention ; she certainly was not without 
some feeling for the insidious allurement of the opportunity. 
And the acquiescence with which she seemed to be taking her 


VOYSEY 


271 


place in the procession made a discovery that fairly appalled 
him. The direction of her curiosity would reveal itself in the 
way in which certain small incidents, certain small glimpses 
of drama, would take and retain her attention ; he felt the 
question and the doubt with which she would watch certain 
forms and faces, with which she would claim his observation 
for the movements of couples — a sudden encounter, the 
stoop of a man’s figure when his companion made him pause 
by a window, the abrupt calling of a hansom — a case in 
which she would follow the climbing of the lady into the seat 
under the driver’s polite lifting of the reins, the man’s giving 
of the address over the roof, the bearing away of the vehicle 
upon the bosom of the stream of the traffic, with an interest 
that betrayed the working of imagination, with an expression 
of wistfulness and expectancy. Their past, their intimacy, 
the bond between them, gave her a freedom in expressing her 
conjectures, in claiming his attention when she would. She 
would appeal to his experience with a kind of malicious 
confidence in it; he knew — she knew enough of him to be 
quite sure that he knew, and at the same time of the past 
which his knowledge implied she somehow never showed 
herself jealous. There were the conjectures and curiosities 
and questionings of the moment, and, what was worse, there 
were the allusions and recurrences to them at other times, the 
times when they were alone together, in the hours they still 
passed at the villa. The tone of their intercourse was deteri- 
orating ; it was as if the consciousness of these contacts were 
corrupting it, as if the recognition of the presence and purpose 
of the others were effecting a nearer approximation. Their 
intercourse was becoming heated with the perpetual fermenta- 
tion of evil divinings and imaginings. 

“ What a world it is ! ” she exclaimed, one day. “ How 
one wonders where all the people are going to ! ” 

“ Ah, one wonders,” he echoed, “ where, indeed ! ” 


272 


VOYSEY 


She looked at him. “ One has a sort of idea about some 
of them.” 

“Yes, one has one’s conjectures,” he admitted. 

They were passing the entrance of the Burlington Arcade. 
Her eyes rested on two women who happened to be talking 
on the steps. 

“ It is something to have the courage of one’s convictions,” 
she observed. 

He had noticed the direction in which she had just looked. 

“ That is a kind of courage, I think,” he said, “ men as a 
rule are not wanting in.” 

“ There seems nothing to prevent you up here.” 

“ There’s not much.” 

They walked on a little way. He imagined her thoughts 
had taken a different turn. She added presently, however — 

“What a lot there is going on up here — I mean, that 
people never talk about.” 

“ I fancy we talk a little more than we did,” he said. 

“ But what a lot there is ! It is funny to think how little 
one knew about it.” Then, after a pause, she reflected, 
“ There are certainly a good many besides you and me. We 
are not the only ones ! ” 

By stopping for an instant to look in at a shop-window she 
saved him from seeking a reply. 

“ I suppose,” she went on, knows as much about things 
as you do, doesn’t he ? ” 

“ I have no idea what he knows, but I think you may be 
pretty sure his is the better record.” 

She laughed. “ I wonder ” 

“ I think you may be sure ” 

“ I dare say.” 

“ It’s rather a point in his favour, isn’t it ? ” 

“ I suppose so. Still, it’s interesting to know about things 
all the same.” 


VOYSEY 


273 


As the days went by, she drew upon his knowledge with an 
increasing frankness, she left the interest and the curiosity 
that were becoming a pre-occupation with her frankly ad- 
mitted and exposed. And this interest, this curiosity, this 
recognition of their fellowship with the others, of their part in 
this world of promiscuous and perfidious pleasures, introduced 
a deeper demoralization into their consciousness of themselves. 
To his accusation of it for its sufferings and its iniquities it 
was as if the city retorted by compelling his attention for an- 
other aspect of its irony ; among its multitudinous properties 
it had this too — this of making one recognize oneself. It 
was as if they were being perpetually reminded of the nature 
of the bond between them, of the ultimate terms to which 
this intercourse of theirs might be reduced. It had never 
seemed so unsanctioned, this intercourse, so illicit, it had 
never — to use the old word — appeared so wicked. While 
they had kept it apart, uncompared, unrelated, an experience 
by itself, in the comparative innocence in which they had 
lived since their final surrender of innocence at Morebay — 
the mere thought of the romance of it, the audacity, had 
helped to absolve them from thinking much of anything else. 
Now the difficulty seemed to be to get away from a constant 
pre-occupation with this new aspect of their state, from meas- 
uring the road they had traversed, looking up from the depth 
they had reached ; the difficulty seemed to be to talk or to 
think, either in their wanderings among the crowd, or in their 
privacy at the villa, of anything wholly free from the taint of 
some morbid or sensual implication. 

And in this loss of the better features of their relations, this 
decay of such poor fruit and flowers as the tree of their union 
had borne them, Voysey perceived the lamentable fulfilment 
of his own prevision, an ample justification of that reluctance 
of which the manifestation that night at Morebay had been so 
untimely and so grotesque ; his sense of the lamentableness 

T 


274 


VOYSEY 


of it all was poignant, and the more poignant because he 
frankly recognized that this fulfilment, after all, must be laid 
to his charge, this deterioration be accounted his work. 

The days went by — Christmas Day with the others, and 
the situation held him with its pitiless logic. It was not the 
least of the ironies of the position that, if they had drawn 
nearer to the crowd, they had drawn nearer to each other. 
Their intimacy had come to mean more. The burden of 
their silences was lightened. There was a shelter open, night 
and day, in which their beggared thoughts could take refuge. 
And never since their return to London had he felt to the 
same degree, in the same way, the dominion of that old power 
of hers. In a certain sense, he had come to feel sure of him- 
self ; to believe at least that if the citadel fell it would be by 
a fair storming of the works, not by an insurgency of the gar- 
rison. It was an effect of his recoil from this deplorable ful- 
filment of his prevision that his regret had gained the quality 
of remorse ; the account was no longer worth keeping — he 
was too much to the bad, it was better to shut the book up ; 
but, by a perversity of nature of which he experienced the full 
dismay, with the deepening of remorse had come the reawak- 
ening of his passion. And it was the nadir of humiliation 
thus to be incited and provoked by the very things that re- 
volted him — it was the last word of moral perversity. 

And the city, with the offer of its boundless opportunity, was 
their accomplice, the city that is so deep in complicity with 
our nature, that takes nothing amiss in the affairs of life or in 
the affairs of love, that seems to wear an aspect of encourage- 
ment for every manifestation of human experience : the city 
was their accomplice, it covered them with its guilty and 
troubling dusk, it was as if its nightly illumination were 
designed in honour of the consummation of loves like theirs. 
The end of their wanderings was inevitable. And it came so 
simply at last that they were almost saved from premeditation. 


VOYSEY 


275 


from the shock of a formal consent. It came by means of a 
further development of that little project of theirs for dining 
one evening in London. On the morning of the 28th, Arthur, 
as he had arranged, left the villa for Liverpool, and, in the 
afternoon, Emily left the villa as well. 


V 


An uneasy week had gone by. Emily had returned from 
Heckingden. 

She had returned but the day before, and the joy of release 
was still strong with her, the joy of escape from the oppressive 
personality of Mrs. Boulger, with her little gift of perpetual 
frustration, for darkening the air in which her relatives lived 
with a cloud of unceasing suggestion. Even now, as Emily 
stood by the chimney-piece in her own drawing-room and 
looked about her, she found it was just as if that darkening 
cloud had travelled up with her from Heckingden : her mother’s 
suggestions, like the locusts of the plague, seemed to fill all the 
house. She had scarcely attained, even after a journey of a 
good many miles and an interval of twenty-four hours, to a 
full sense of ownership in her recovered possessions. As she 
looked at her things, at the vases and fans, the palm and the 
sofa, the window and its curtains, the piano that had its back 
so decently draped in cretonne, it was with some mild shock 
of surprise at their being still there, at the devouring horde 
having spared so much and left so many green things in 
Egypt. 

They were still there, these things, these things that held 
so much of herself. The room was just as she had left it. 
The Christmas holly was lying upon the tops of the pictures 
still, and a diminutive candle, that had been lighted on the 
child’s little Christmas tree, still lay beside the clock upon the 
chimney-piece. Nothing had changed in her absence ; no 
difference occurred to her — except indeed that two vases, 
which, when she went away, had held violets Voysey had 

276 


VOYSEY 


277 


given her, empty now, were standing in a different place. 
And yet to her sense this afternoon, as she took as it were a 
tender inventory of her possessions, the room somehow con- 
veyed the suggestion of a subtle break of continuity. 

She was standing by the chimney-piece in an attitude 
evidently expectant and provisional : the truth was she had 
summoned Voysey to meet her at the Bedford Park station, 
and in having dressed for the purpose as soon as her luncheon 
was over, the usual solitary week-day luncheon in that sub- 
stantial little dining-room of theirs, had dressed a few minutes 
too soon ; there was still an interval to be disposed of before 
she need cross the Green. Little intervals like this, and 
especially if they happen to be charged with intense anticipa- 
tion, are favourable to the reception of impressions : they give 
a chance to the things about us of finding their voice, of 
making us curiously aware of them. And, to Emily this 
afternoon, it seemed that never had an atmosphere so rich in 
association lain over the things before her; never had they 
exerted their power of evocation with the same peculiar prop- 
erty of vividness. Never had the room in its silent penetrat- 
ing way so proclaimed the fulness of the life she had lived. 
It was far from having the look, as in the old days, of a scene 
that was waiting for the actors, — it had the look of a scene 
in which a drama of the intensest possible kind had been 
played. It was a wonderful life she had lived, they were 
wonderful months to look back upon, it had been like the 
coming true of rare and wonderful dreams. And all this 
happiness was still secure, was still hers, — she had a deep 
sense of having come back to it. And yet, as the minutes 
went by and the little interval lengthened, by an effect of 
some perversity of imagination, the impression became some- 
how oppressive : on the whole the impression was not quite 
happy, indeed it was appreciably sad.. It might be that the 
thought of the fulness of the life she had lived, of the rich 


278 


VOYSEY 


fulfilment in it, had brought, if not some hint at the turn of 
the tide, at least a perception of climax. An insidious mel- 
ancholy was stealing over the room ; her detachment deep- 
ened ; she was too much aware of the things about her, she 
was too much aware of herself. She struck out the conclu- 
sion that, after all, it is one’s own life that one puts into one’s 
things, that their life as it were depends upon one’s own life, 
that their look, their language, their greeting will change, if 
one’s own life happens to change. Memory awoke : she re- 
membered how the room had looked before this wonderful 
time, before the romance had begun. She remembered the 
blankness and the barrenness of it, the imperfect response of 
the things she had gathered about her, much as she loved 
them, to the needs of the inner life. And suddenly, as at a 
sudden touch upon a secret spring of imagination, she had a 
vision of how the room would look if some great change, some 
great catastrophe, should occur, she had a vision of herself 
coming back to it. It was but the experience of a moment, 
but it was a moment of intense desolation — a moment of 
utter severance from the things about her, in which she saw 
them as they really were, as silent unresponsive inanimate 
dead things, — in which that loneliness, that final isolation of 
ourselves in ourselves, which for all of us is the ultimate fact 
of existence, seemed, as in a moment when one thinks of 
death, to be the only reality that remained. 

It was but the experience of a moment ; she had too much 
to do with love and with life just then to let thoughts of death 
and desolation have dominion : but the impressions of those 
minutes oppressed her. She still felt the oppression even when 
she had left the room, even when she had left the house, and, 
having passed down the strip of red tiles, had crossed the road 
and gained the Green. 

It was a dead and joyless winter’s day : the kind of day to 
take cruel advantage of the dreariness of empty places. And 


VOYSEY 


279 


indeed the Green looked singularly purposeless and inexpres- 
sive, lying empty and bare within the white posts of the rail- 
ings, the grass just touched with frost; the embankment with 
the telegraph wires and posts and signals seemed more than 
ever to dominate it, more than ever to stand out and proclaim 
itself the one thing of importance in the prospect. Clearly, 
the Green existed upon sufferance, the charity of the city had 
spared it. The sky was infinitely monotonous ; the air was 
cold enough for discomfort, but had no crispness, no exhilara- 
tion ; the frost had gken on the asphalt path, which was 
besmeared with a thin, greasy, slippery mud. 

Emily reached the further end of the Green, passed out 
between the posts of the railings into the road, and finding by 
the clock in the booking-office that she was still a few minutes 
too soon, took a turn towards the bridge of the embankment. 
Her oppression had lightened. It had yielded to the exercise, 
to a certain vagueness of ideas induced by the open air, by the 
discomfort of the weather, by an involuntary participation in 
the mild suburban activity of the road ; — and had yielded, more 
especially, to an access of intense anticipation, to an expansion 
of unreasoning and almost childlike delight in the joy of the 
prospect of the meeting. 

She turned at the sound of a train — as she turned the 
engine appeared and stopped upon the bridge, protruding above 
the roadway — and by the time she had reached the embank- 
ment again, the first passenger was emerging from the steps. 
The second passenger who emerged was Voysey. 

It is merciful for us when the stroke of calamity is dealt 
with such deftness as to sever the possibility of any return 
of our memories. For Emily, when she looked back at it, 
the experiences of the afternoon did not begin till some 
minutes later ; she did not come up to the surface, as it were, 
was not restored to the active possession of the present, till 
Voysey and she had left the station and the Green behind 


zSo 


VOYSEY 


them for some minutes, and were following the road of fanciful 
little houses that led to the scene of his pitiable explanation. 
Through those first moments she lived but once : her memory 
never recovered them. 

Yet, in reality, there was less of sudden shock and more of 
transition, more of a definite process of enlightenment, than 
she afterwards remembered there had been ; in reality, she 
divined his purpose almost as much from the efforts he made 
during the first few minutes to hide it as from anything she 
saw written in his face. It was not until they were some way 
down the road that her discovery was complete, its completion 
having the effect of extinguishing the last feeble flicker of the 
effort Voysey was making to maintain appearances and keep 
under the shelter of the accustomed. 

“ I see you have guessed,” he said. 

“ That you have something to say ? ” 

“ Ah, be merciful,” her tone prompted him to cry. “ Don’t 
make it too hard for me.” 

They walked on. They reached the last of the too fanci- 
ful little houses, the ingenuity of whose windows, with the 
clever management of the curtains, seemed to hint at the war- 
fare waged within with the methods of the older decoration : — 
and here the road, leaving the asphalt of the pavement though 
retaining the gas-lamps, came to an end, as an authentic and 
recognized convenience ; its smooth suburban surface degen- 
erated into a frozen sea of billowy ruts, beside which the path 
followed a line of dilapidated, dejected iron hurdles that pro- 
tected a desolation of Brussels sprouts. They passed out into 
a stretch of waste unoccupied land lying in the curve of a 
railway, where the pall of the sombre monotonous sky hung 
over a wider horizon. 

“ I am listening,” she said. “ Say what you have to.” 

He hesitated. 

“ You know it, you know it, you have divined it already.” 


VOYSEY 


28 


She looked vaguely before her. 

‘‘ I see you have changed/’ she murmured. 

“ In a week ? ” 

Her quivering lip failed to support the accusation. 

“ Ah no, you know it’s not that,” he said. 

In spite of the attitude of reservation, of defence, her tone 
suggested, morally, he divined, she had surrendered. The 
intensity of determination he had brought to his purpose had 
cleared the field and dispersed the expected resistance, like the 
parade of invincible legions. And the consciousness of his 
strength was a relief to him, it even gave him (so little had he 
foreseen how it would be) a moment of sheer exhilaration. 

‘‘You know it’s not that,” he repeated. 

“ What is it, then ? I thought lately ” 

“Say it.” 

“You were happier. You seemed so. . . . You said 
nothing about it in your letter.” 

“ I didn’t want you to know anything by that.” 

“ But you knew yourself? ” 

“ When I wrote ? Oh, by that time, I suppose. ... It 
has been a horrible nightmare,” he cried. “ All this week, I 
mean.” 

“ What is it, then ? What has happened to you ? ” 

Still, for a moment or two, he hesitated, kept himself back, 
fixed the point for beginning twenty yards further on, at a par- 
ticular lamp-post, as if that were the space his thought required 
to measure the last step of his argument : yet, in reality, his 
reluctance was rather a prevision of the remorse he would 
feel by and by than actual shrinking from his cruelty at that 
moment. The intensity of his purpose consumed him like 
the obsession of a fixed idea. His desire to reach the goal of 
his explanation with her was like that of a wretch running the 
gauntlet, in days we read of, of some public barbarity in chas- 
tisement ; at his heels he had the misery of the past week 


282 


VOYSEY 


scourging him on, while the miseries of many weeks pressed 
and crowded upon him to keep him ruthlessly in the track. 
And still when the first phrase came to him — it was a little 
beyond the point he had fixed — and he had once fairly begun, 
he realized he was talking with extraordinary ease, with an 
extraordinary lucidity and precision j he found himself doing 
what it had appeared (and with excellent reason) it would be 
impossible to do ; he was giving her without too much reproach, 
without rending too cruelly the supposition of their happiness, 
without too preposterous an accusation of his own fidelity, a 
sense of the utter intolerableness of their position. During 
the past week he himself had reached the limit, the point at 
which the burden of an immeasurable disgust could be no 
longer borne : that last descent of theirs had completed his 
revolt from their relations, in which he saw such descents 
must inevitably recur in an endless and lurid succession. In 
their intercourse now there could be nothing but depths; their 
intimacy could only resolve itself into a perpetual search for 
fresh opportunities, to each of which would attach some cir- 
cumstance of deeper indignity, some infamy of a deeper decep- 
tion. This revolt, in the miserable swayings and strivings of 
his thought, which had tortured the leisure of his temporary 
release, had kept its place as the dominant motive : though in 
truth he had reached the point at which motives had ceased to 
be separable even by his admirable discrimination. One thing 
at least was certain : if the horror of the situation had become 
insupportable, it was to a sufficient extent horror of himself. And 
if, as they walked on, following the billowy frozen ruts of the 
unmade road, that led them out further and further into the 
wilderness of unoccupied desolation, where the odour even of 
strong vegetables was less strong than the pernicious odour of 
brick-fields, he did convey to her that need for pause, for the 
arrest of their terrible progress, with which the conflict of his 
revolt had inspired him, he managed to do it without too 


VOYSEY 


283 

immense a reversal of their point of view, without making too 
cruel a return upon everything. After all, the objections to 
the continuance of their relations were tolerably obvious — 
what was needed was the courage to state them. The con- 
sciousness of his ascendency enabled him to have this courage ; 
he was dominating, even mystifying her a little, perhaps, in 
the old way with his cleverness. And over and above the 
exhilaration of his success, he had a delightful sense of begin- 
ning to be at last himself again ; he was now really forging his 
way out ; every word he said had the effect of detaching him 
from the situation, of giving him room, of enabling him to 
recover the luxury of a more natural attitude. He had a 
sense of escape, of the sundering of bonds, of the recovery of 
mental freedom, such as he had not known for months. 

“ It is simply the acceptance of an inevitable condition. A 
condition of which we have been perfectly, horribly aware 
every hour we have spent together,” so he had afterwards a 
painful remembrance of having reasoned. “ The condition, 
I mean, of an inevitable limit. We have never pretended 
the future was ours. We have never claimed more than the 
present. We have known all along we were living from day 
to day. The recognition of this has been of the very essence 
of the whole thing, of our whole position. We have had the 
shadow of the end upon every hour we have known. We 
have all along had the sense that our good time was something 
snatched from the gods ; — who in the end were bound to be 
too many for us ! It has been a horrible condition — horrible 
enough in all conscience, and yet, heaven knows ! there are 
other conditions that are worse. Love may end in more 
ghastly ways than this — in more ghastly things than separa- 
tion — such a separation as ours, I mean. What I say, then, 
is for heaven’s sake let us part now, while everything is still 
at its best and we can choose the moment, rather than wait to 
be parted by some sordid and sickening catastrophe. Our 


284 


VOYSEY 


luck will never go on. The chances are ten to one that 
sooner or later we come to grief. And then how should we 
end ? It would be a thousand times worse, a thousand times 
more ghastly. Now, at all events, whatever we lose, we shall 
have it splendidly to the good that we save our love : but if 
we wait till we go on the rocks, do you suppose, good Lord ! 
we shall save anything at all ? ” 

He talked on and talked on, his eyes fixed on the spire of a 
church rising above the sordid horizon. Fine, distant, curiously 
alone, the one feature of beauty in a prospect of utter unlove- 
liness, it rose above the vague outline of the low houses massed 
in the distance before them, and detached itself grey and 
graceful against the grey ungracious sky ! It was the one point 
in the prospect of which he was conscious, and into his con- 
sciousness of it there entered, by the working of some fine 
process, the idea of a subtle frustration. He talked on and 
talked on, and Emily listened to him, — oh, yes, she was cer- 
tainly listening ! but little by little (and this no doubt was the 
meaning of his impression from the spire) he felt he was losing 
his verve. He found he was beginning to say the same things 
over again, and was not saying them half so well. Indeed, 
upon repetition, so ill did they bear it, he lost satisfaction in 
having said them at all. It came over him that all this talk, 
this laboured ingenuity, this tremendous attempt to soften 
his determination and diminish the reproach of it, had the 
absurdity of a tour de force: he had softened absolutely 
nothing, — there was really nothing that could be softened in 
a purpose so desperately hard. Through all he said he saw 
one fact piercing and towering up like the peak of a mountain 
through the mist, jagged and bristling and cruel : the fact that 
if he had really loved her, he would not have said one word 
of it. 

The exhilaration passed, his words died away, they walked 
on in a silence as dreary and desolate as the day and the region 


VOYSEY 


285 


about them. It was the dreariest silence they had known j 
all the others appeared to be resumed in it ; it was weighted 
with, as it were, there was gathered up in it, the whole 
burden of their infinite estrangement. And if this was to 
be the last of their wanderings they could have chosen for 
it no better scene — nothing better than a no man’s land like 
this, a region where everything had the look of having come to 
an end; — except the irony of the city. Voysey saw they had 
not wandered from that : it was there, as visibly there, to the 
divining eye, as ever it had been in the densest scenes of their 
wanderings. He divined it, in his awakening consciousness 
of outer things, lurking in every impression : every circum- 
stance seemed an occasion for it, every wintry feature of the 
prospect ; the heaviness of the sky ministered to it, the air that 
came raw over the open space, the whiteness on the grass in 
the fields on their right that were enclosed between the road 
and the railway. It was there, this irony, he divined, in the 
suggestions of the sordid horizon, which, made by the ends of 
unfinished streets, the backs of unfinished buildings, where now 
and again there was the flare of a tawdry advertisement, had 
an effect of unsightly frayed edges : it was suggested to his 
imagination by the murmur of life upon the air, the murmur 
of traffic, the sound perpetually of the passing and passing of 
trains, the white steam of which would suddenly puff up above 
some houses, at a point beyond the brick-fields on the right. 
His sense of the long failure of their passion, of which his 
pitiable explanation was the final acknowledgment, gained 
the misery of a deeper dejection in this region of waste and 
futility : a region in which, nevertheless, the presence of the 
city oppressed him with the thought of its latent complicity. 
Indeed, the city seemed almost as much their accomplice now, 
under this aspect of immense discouragement, as ever they had 
found it even in the dusk of the surging streets : only now it 
was like an accomplice turned evidence against them, like a 


286 


VOYSEY 


procuress deriding the disillusionment of loves she had lured 
and betrayed. 

“ I will go home now, I think, if you have told me all you 
have to,” Emily said, when, a little beyond the brick-fields, 
they reached a road which offered them a choice of ways. 

“ Very good ; then we must turn to the left.” 

They took the turning, and it brought them presently to 
a neighbourhood of laundries and unwholesome little shops, 
where hawkers were crying things in empty streets, from 
which a board school they passed, that sent out a sing-song of 
children’s voices, was withholding the customary animation. 
When they were nearing the Green once more, at the point 
furthest from the station, she suddenly turned to him again. 

“ You had better not come any further,” she said. 

“ Not see you home ? ” 

“ You’d better not. You may be seen by some one.” 

“ Will it matter now much if I am ? ” 

He saw her lift her veil and wipe her eyes. An impulse 
to prolong their walk in the hope of finding some happier 
inspiration for their parting awoke in him, and when they 
came to the road that ran by the white posts of the Green he 
half paused ; but Emily took the turning to the villa. 

When they reached it, he opened the gate in the wooden 
palings and held it back. But she did not pass in : she 

stopped, and he saw that for the first time she had taken a 

resolution. She had found the inspiration that he had been 
tempted to seek, and it was an inspiration with so much force 
in it that for a minute or two it actually gave her the situation. 
With a fine unexpectedness she put off the passivity, the 

acquiescence, the air of surrender she had worn hitherto, and 

exchanged it for an attitude in which he perceived, as unmis- 
takably as by a declaration in words, her absolute rejection of 
all he had said. He had an instant sense that the scene he had 
been making her was convicted of futility, of its being annulled 


VOYSEY 


287 


by her rising above it, of the whole position being suddenly 
judged from a totally different point of view. It wasn’t the real 
thing, she bravely declared ; as between them this sort of thing 
couldn’t mean much : there were things between them that 
did mean just a little too much for that. The real thing was 
in there, her smile finely implied, as she glanced towards the 
drawing-room window. 

“Come in,” she said. 

His hand trembled on the gate. He experienced a shock of 
relief which was also a shock of reaction. The effect of her 
attitude at that moment, of her recovery, her complete refusal 
to be impressed, her feminine directness and tenacity, appeared 
to him little less than superb. It was as if in recovering herself 
she had recovered her old power and provocation : a wave of 
old impressions, old pleasures, old emotions rushed over him ; 
something in her face, her eyes, her look, her dress, heaven 
knew what ! had the power to evoke the memory of the night 
of their last escapade, and to sweep him back with a turbulence 
of exuberant delight into the very midst of their delirious joys. 

“Come in, Bertie,” she said. 

She glanced again at the window, and a turn of his head 
towards the villa, in following the direction of her glance, gave 
him the air of yielding. She saw it, and came a step nearer 
to the gate. 

“ Come along,” she pressed him. 

But the victory had cost too much in the gaining for the 
fruits of it to be squandered at the last like that. He recovered 
himself. 

“ No,” he said, and unconsciously, yet in a way that seemed 
to enforce his decision, he pressed the gate further back. 
“ Good-bye.” 

Emily yielded. She passed in, the dejection of her surrender 
made deeper by the brightness and courage of her recovery, 
and he let the gate fall slowly to. He lingered for a moment 


288 


VOYSEY 


with his hand still on the palings, looking towards the house 
after her. He followed her figure as she moved over the strip 
of red tiles and passed through the porch into the villa, and, 
as his eyes strayed to the window of the drawing-room, he had 
imagination enough to follow her still, and feel the misery 
of the scene he knew would pass there when she was once 
more alone among her things. 


VI 


Nelson, whose interest in Voysey’s great-coats was an older 
matter than the interest of our friend himself, seeing that it 
went back to the days of strenuous revolt against the inflic- 
tion of this discredit upon youthful hardiness, had just given 
some experienced attention to a new venture of the young 
man’s, of which he permitted himself to express an approval 
that quite carried the weight of a guarantee. 

“ It’s all right, then, is it. Nelson ? ” he asked. 

“ It’s all right, sir.” 

“All right about the collar? ” 

“ It shows the collar nicely. Just enough.” 

“You’re a judge of a coat. Nelson. Give me my hat.” 

The man relaxed. “ I have seen a good many of yours, 
Mr. Herbert.” 

“ Well, we must keep up the old form, you know.” 

“ I think this does, sir.” 

As he was taking the hat from its peg, a summons of the 
electric bell diverted him to the front-door. 

“ A telegram, sir.” 

Voysey read it. “ There’s no answer.” 

Nelson dismissed the boy. He took down the hat, polished 
it with an old silk handkerchief he found in a drawer of the 
hatstand, and handed it to Voysey. 

“Thanks,” Voysey said. 

“ Wearing a little at the edge, I see.” 

Voysey didn’t hear him. 

“ Not worn quite so well as the last, I think.” 
u 289 


290 


VOYSEY 


Voysey had gone to the strip of window-pane let in beside 
the front-door, and was looking out into the street. 

Nelson replaced the handkerchief in the drawer. A long 
experience, in that very hall where they stood, of emotions 
upon which it had been a first point in his duty never to in- 
trude, had deepened the discretion natural to the man and 
especially proper to his office. He found occupation about 
the hatstand sufficient to fill several seconds. 

Voysey remained by the window. 

“ Shall you be taking a hansom, sir ? ” 

“ A hansom ? No, I don’t think so. Oh, I don’t know. 
I’ll ask Miss Nell when she comes down. But you needn’t 
wait.” 

Nelson withdrew. 

Voysey left the window and took a turn down the hall, the 
telegram still fluttering in his fingers. 

“ It is horrible ! ” he said. 

“ What is, Bertie ? ” 

Nell, who spoke from the landing at an angle of the easy 
stairs, was absorbed in the buttoning of a glove, an absorption 
that had made her progress leisurely, and her turning of the 
corner noiseless. She looked up from the button, and down 
at Voysey. 

He, to carry off the surprise with a show of lightness, 
flourished the telegram. “ An invitation like this,” he called 
up to her. 

Nell had done with the button. She came down the last 
stairs into the hall. 

“ What is it for ? ” she asked. 

Voysey restored the telegram to its envelope. And it was 
as if the further fingering of the thing, the sight of it in its 
cover again as he had first seen it, stirred his emotions too 
vividly. His lightness broke down. It was beyond him to 
keep up the pleasantry. Nell, who was not much accustomed 


VOYSEY 


291 


to so complete a failure of his spirit, wondered. And she 
really only wondered the more because there had been other 
occasions, during her stay at home this vacation, that had 
ministered to a distressed conjecture. 

“ Perhaps you can’t come now,” she suggested. 

“ Oh, rather ! ” he exclaimed. “ I’m not going to accept it.” 

His face, however, had not the brightness of his tone. And 
it was in response to the expression of the former that Nell 
added — 

“ Shall we give up the calls ? Shall we go for a wander 
instead ? ” 

“ Heaven forbid ! ” he declared with a fervour that would 
have revealed, to any one in the secret, how the impression of 
other wanderings had persisted. “ No, a call upon Aunt Jane 
will be the very thing. We must see whether she still shows 
the good effect of her day at Cambridge. Come along. We 
shall get a hansom at the corner.” But seeing that the sym- 
pathy in the girl’s face was still not quite dispelled, he added, 
‘‘You’re a brick, my dear Nell.” 

“ If there were anything,” she murmured, “ one could 
do ” 

“There is : — just what you’re doing,” he laughed. 

During the drive, during the calls, during their little stroll 
across the Park on the way home, it was an understood thing 
between them that, whatever it was, Nell was still doing it. 
At Lady Luttrell’s, however, he recovered his spirits, and 
there was something he did for Nell. Lady Luttrell, who 
had well nigh been won to the great cause by what her god- 
daughter had shown her during a day she had spent in Cam- 
bridge in the previous term, was inclined this afternoon, in a 
disappointing way, to go back upon some of her concessions. 
In tones that were loud, and with decisive little nods of the 
head that somehow suggested the finality of the auctioneer’s 
hammer, she took high ground, the familiar high ground of 


292 


VOYSEY 


the feminine graces, the social amenities, of which she pro- 
claimed herself to be the champion, arriving at last at a regret 
that the charm of certain Greek women, whose fame has 
come down through the ages, was not to be acquired with a 
knowledge of their language. 

“ You get nothing of that, my dear,” she declared, with a 
nod that rang out across the room like the rap that awards to 
the highest bidder possession of an exceptional lot. 

Poor Nell, who, if she sometimes found the sense of being 
on view a stimulus to her social exertions, would not at other 
times have been sorry to escape from the enforced prominence 
of the pioneer, with all the wondering and bewildered observa- 
tion it entailed, welcomed her brother’s levity. 

“ Oh, a college of modern Aspasias ! ” he laughed, his 
amusement not lessened by the remembrance of the different 
line it had sometimes occurred to him to take. “ It is really 
very wicked of you ! To want these dear girls ” 

“ I don’t want them to be Aspasias,” Aunt Jane took him 
up. “ I want them to be charming women.” 

“ Ah, but that’s still so much ! ” 

“ In these days ! ” 

“ And in what days was it less ? ” 

If Lady Luttrell was tempted to cite days that might have 
been considered her own in distinction to the more recent 
times of her hearers, something — though perhaps not a sense 
of humour — made her abstain from the citation. 

“ After all,” he hazarded, “ to be quite charming, from the 
point of view, I mean, of a lasting reputation, mustn’t a 
woman have just a little — well, of the courage of those 
Greek ladies ? So many charming women, ‘ whose fame has 
come down through the ages,’ have been something less than 
Penelopes.” 

“ It only shows how history has been made by men,” was 
Lady Luttrell’s rejoinder. 


VOYSEY 


293 


“ Perhaps if we could be taken a little more for granted 

” Nell ventured to suggest. “To be coming in for 

such a lot of criticism ” 

“ Proves ho\V^ much you interest people, my dear. Don’t 
complain.” 

But before the call was over, Lady Luttrell’s manner 
softened to a comparative amenity that was at least a nearer 
approximation to her ideal. 

It was after the other call, however, when they had turned 
into the Park where the frost, that during the past week had 
grown more rigorous and more wintry, lay white under the 
trees whose high branches detached themselves against the sky 
in the early-gathered winter’s dusk, that the thing between 
them which was understood gained a deeper recognition. The 
shock of the impression Nell had received that night, many 
months ago, when the Morebay episode had first appeared to 
trouble her conjectures, had persisted, but had produced no 
effect of estrangement. Her wonder had been great that such 
things should be — even with the limited implication discovered 
in the phrase by the thought of a nice-minded girl. And her 
wonder had risen to a louder note when, upon another meet- 
ing with Mrs. Detmond, who had called the afternoon of 
Nell’s return from Cambridge, she had noticed that more 
buoyant manner, that freer and more expansive enjoyment of 
the occasion, which had given Miss Voysey, at a previous 
call, her nervous apprehension of developments. The girl 
had a deep sense that she didn’t understand, that beyond a 
certain point, in spite of the absorbing interest human com- 
plications had for her, she didn’t much want to understand, 
it being just her deepest accusation of Mrs. Detmond that she 
had made her conscious of this reluctance : but whatever the 
clue to the strange infatuation might be, the total want in her 
brother’s manner of the exuberant buoyancy of the lady’s, re- 
vealed on his part a felicity so qualified, a judgment or per- 


294 


VOYSEY 


haps even a conscience so little at rest, that she kept her faith 
that there had been no such irreparable violation of their point 
of view, but that the matter one day might come up between 
them under an aspect it would not be impossible to accept. 

Though Emily’s name never passed their lips, the matter, 
she was quite convinced, one day would come up : and he, 
appreciating the affection that inspired the girl’s reticence and 
self-control, had a feeling of having her in reserve. It was 
her wish to let him know that if ever he should want her, she 
would be there; and he had the weakness to find additional 
value in a friendship in which the judgment of youth, that 
judgment which is usually so terribly inflexible, was softened 
by a sense of the difficulty of things as well as by an inalien- 
able affection. 

“ I am glad you stood up to Aunt Jane,” Nell was 
saying. ‘‘Talk like that sometimes makes one feel rather 
desperate.” 

“ One good turn deserves another.” 

“ I don’t know where mine comes in.” 

“Yours? Why, everywhere, don’t you see! It’s always 
coming in. That’s the beauty of it.” 

“ It’s about time it did. You have done enough for me.” 

“ Oh, my dear Nell I A little chaff, perhaps, of the more 
excessive strenuosities ” 

But here she took him up. “ You are very strenuous 
yourself.” 

His laughter rang out. A workman, one of the stream they 
were meeting on the path, turned at the unusual sound. “ Oh, 
heaven I ” he cried. “ And I haven’t done a day’s work for 
years I ” 

“That’s nothing. You feel things tremendously. You 
take things awfully to heart.” 

His merriment was arrested. The girl was so tall that her 
face was not very much below the level of his own, but it was 


VOYSEY 


295 

veiled too effectually by the dark for its finer expression to be 
interpreted. 

“ It’s your turn now,” he put in. 

“You feel things like a woman.” 

“ Oh, I say ! ” 

“ I know,” Nell cheerfully Insisted. 

As to how much she knew he felt a trifle uncertain, but her 
intention, at all events, it now appeared not very difficult to 
divine. 

“You are a bold girl, Nell,” he cautioned her. 

“ I have known you some time, Bertie.” 

“ You get bolder and bolder! Ah, but I have done some 
cruel things in my day,” he said. “ Some very ugly things.” 

Nell expressed her interest by her silence. 

“ They are atrocious, the things one does. They are 
unpardonable. And, let me hasten to add, one makes them 
no better by accusing oneself of them. Self-accusation is a 
very old form of impenitence : to confess is much easier than 
to be sorry. To repent, really, is one of the hardest things in 
the world.” 

Nell made an attempt at encouragement. 

“ There is only one test of repentance left for us now-a-days 
— celibacy. One only repents of one’s evil propensities when 
one abstains from passing them on.” 

They were approaching the Marble Arch : at the end of the 
walk they were following, high up above the gas-lamps, that 
by contrast made lines of dingy orange points in the darkness, 
shone the intense white-blue glare of the electric light, the 
figures, crossing the bare space about the foot of the high post 
that carried it, looking curiously black and vivid as they moved 
over the frosty ground. 

“Yes, that is really how one does feel sometimes,” Nell 
admitted. “ But it’s taking things pretty hard.” 

When they had passed out of the gates, and crossed to the 


296 


VOYSEY 


other side of Oxford Street, he noticed that her pace was 
slackening. 

‘‘You are tired, Nell,” he said. “We’ll have a hansom.” 

“ It would be rather nice, wouldn’t it ? It’s awfully cold.” 

After the life of the larger thoroughfare, where the sea of 
light and of sound seemed, as one might say, thrown up 
against the houses like the beat of a storm in the night, to 
pass into the quiet of Harley Street with its empty pavements 
and dim roadway was to get a new sense of the bitterness of 
the evening. It was not an hour for consulting its oracles, 
and the venerable street was ofF duty : it had put off the air 
of professional indulgence it wears in the morning hours, and 
offered no encouragement to the casual wanderer. The solemn, 
sober-fronted houses almost suggested a disapproval of too 
much discomfort, so complete was the return they had made 
upon their aspect of professional charity. Beside the cheerful 
fanlights and the comfortable gloom of firelit rooms of which 
glimpses could be caught through unshuttered windows, and 
which spoke of a system of comfort very highly developed, 
there was a deeper misery in the perspective of interminable 
gas-lamps marshalled along the dark roadway. Still, at one 
of the cross-roads a hansom was waiting, and they passed a 
brougham waiting before a doctor’s door, the figure of the 
coachman blotted out, as it were, between the strong bright- 
ness of the lamps. It appeared to Voysey that, until they 
drew near their own house, they had not seen a soul upon the 
pavements : as he put out his stick to indicate the number to 
their cabman, he saw a figure move away. 

The hansom drew abruptly to the curb, and the figure was 
almost overtaken : then in the darkness beyond the next gas- 
lamp it grew vague and dim ; but before it had quite passed, 
he became aware of a recognition. He turned to Nell to see 
whether she had recognized Emily too ; in the light of the 
lamp in the hall he saw very plainly she had. 


VOYSEY 


297 


It was after dinner that night, when Nell and Miss Voysey 
had left him, and all the comfort of the shadowy room seemed 
like a summons to him to take his ease, that he knew the full 
wretchedness of the incident. It had come as the climax of 
a week deep in wretchedness, as the last drop in a cup that 
was full. For three days after their parting Emily had made 
no sign ; on the fourth had appeared the first of a series of 
letters, piteous, reckless, desperate, full of every kind of im- 
possible appeal, that it had cost him almost as much to read 
as even it cbuld have cost her to write. They were incred- 
ible letters — tender, playful, passionate, despairing, hysterical, 
absurd, the extraordinary crudities of expression in which 
they abounded deepening their dreadful sincerity. There were 
things in them that jarred upon him, that revolted him, at 
which he shuddered as one shudders at the hysterical aban- 
donment of last communications for the Coroner : and there 
were sentences that rang in his ears for hours together, the 
pathos of them was so true. The sense of release and escape, 
the momentary triumph of their parting, had turned to a last- 
ing sense of complete and most dismal frustration : he had 
recovered no freedom at all ; he was less free now than ever 
he had been, for her cries were never out of his ears. The 
brutality of their rupture appeared to him with a look that 
was scarcely more odious than stupid : what in the world was 
a man’s experience worth if he couldn’t manage better than 
this ? — how could a man manage much worse than to make 
a woman suffer in this way ? He had lost all idea that their 
separation had been designed in her interest as well as his 
own, to save her as well as himself ; he seemed to have cast 
her off merely for his own escape ; and, with the despair of 
her letters ringing in his ears, the act looked as infamous as 
that of the man who, when the ship goes down, beats a drowning 
woman from a boat. 

The telegram she had sent him had been a request that he 


298 


VOYSEY 


would meet her at Portland Road, and the discovery of her in 
Harley Street so long after the hour she had appointed was a 
clue to how her afternoon had been spent. He could realize 
how she had spent it pretty vividly ! What his uncompro- 
mising rejection of so desperate an appeal must have meant 
for her, it was easy to infer from the extremity of unhappiness 
that had prompted her to make the appeal; his imagination, 
however, went beyond this, and worked out the details of 
her afternoon in all its smaller discomforts : he imagined her 
wandering in the dusk, dreary and forlorn, in the streets of 
which all their past wanderings together had not lessened her 
dread, nor given her any better command. And, as he thought 
of these things, his refusal to meet her had for him the bru- 
tality of another blow of the oar, of another thrust under the 
waters of oblivion. 

He grew restless. He began to pace the room. He had 
no capacity at all for taking his ease. Even the cigarette, 
which was his pretext for not going to the drawing-room with 
the others, remained by his glass unlighted. His refusal to 
meet her was odious. He saw it as one of those things which 
men, who break with their mistresses, are driven to do — one 
of those things by which the clash of the eternal selfishness 
and the eternal antagonism, latent in the passions of men and 
women, is so often and so shamefully revealed. He had had 
a horror all his life of the brutality of men towards women ; 
in his school days he had had it, and it had been in conflict 
with the extreme depravity of the youthful imagination, and 
later, at Oxford and in London, as he had listened to men’s 
fearful boasts, he had had it too, and it had given him an 
attitude of reserve. Never, it had not seemed too much to 
believe, should any affair of his end in such a way as those ; 
whatever might happen, he would at least be generous, he 
would at least be kind. 

He continued to pace the room, passing up and down 


VOYSEY 


299 

through the shadows, from the folding-doors with the side- 
board before them to the window, and from the window to 
the folding-doors, under the gloomy dulness of the pictures. 
What he wanted supremely was to stop her cries. And it is 
only fair to him to add that what he wanted was not merely 
that he should be less aware of her misery, but that she should 
be less miserable. He wanted, to an extent he felt a delicacy 
in acknowledging even to himself, to atone to her, to put the 
matter right, somehow to be more of the one to pay. And 
mixed up with this impulse, blending with it, perhaps in 
reality its secret explanation, were feelings by the discovery of 
which the step it would have been simplest to take — the 
concession of seeing her — was barred and made impossible. 
He had no courage for the meeting, he was not sure enough 
of the turn things might take, the astonishing reason he gave 
for his doubts being this, that he had really missed her too 
much. Of a change that had passed so much more in the 
region of feeling than in the region of thought he could render 
no clear account : but it was quite definite to him that he was 
experiencing a sense of loss, of regret, of recoil even from 
the small measure of freedom he had won, the sense of a 
return to a solitude in which there lurked a subtle and intan- 
gible dread like that in the solitude of his boyhood. It was 
almost as if he had not nerve enough for what he had done, 
as if he were frightened by his own resolution. There were 
moments of solitude in which he imagined that in abandoning 
her love he had deprived himself of some mysterious protec- 
tion, in which he was conscious, as it were, of a keener 
exposure to destiny. ^Through all the months of their inter- 
course, through all the phases and vicissitudes of their 
relations, there was nothing that had seemed to stand out with 
such persistent distinctness as their want of intimacy, as their 
want of a fine understanding :/ now it was his great discovery 
that there had never been a human creature with whom he 


300 


VOYSEY 


had been so intimate. He was aware that imagination was 
betraying him, that memory was falsifying the past, but it was 
part of the perversity of his state that he was unable to correct 
the distortion. The good hours shone in the light, and the 
many hours which had been so far from good were lost in 
shadow and obscurity. He found it difficult to fill the days 
that were now altogether at his disposal ; the withdrawal of 
her demands upon him, the cessation of the appointments of 
which there had come to be so many, left him with afternoons 
on his hands of which at present he was heavily oppressed by 
the vacancy. It was easy enough to find things to do, but 
what was not quite easy was to recover just the old interest in 
doing them. After all, for excitement, for the rich sense of 
living, what in the world will compare with the love of a 
woman, and a woman whose love you have so deeply enjoyed ? 
It was only now that he realized all he had surrendered to her, 
the immense displacement she had effected in the balance of 
his life, the power of the passions to possess, and react upon, 
the memory, and the imagination, and the will. 

No, one thing was evident enough ; it would be something 
less than wise to make any concessions just yet — to make any 
such concession as to consent to a meeting with her : the turn 
things would be likely to take was really not doubtful at all. 
And as he reached this conclusion he returned to the place 
where he had sat, and took up the cigarette he had neglected. 
He was on his way to the chimney-piece in search of a match, 
when the appearance of Nelson arrested him. 

Nelson closed the door before he delivered his message. 
Upon his person there rested a mysterious air. 

“ What is it. Nelson ? ” 

But Nelson’s discretion made him deliberate. 

“ A lady, sir. A lady wishes to speak to you.” 

“A lady?” 

“Yes, sir. Mrs. Detmond, I believe.” 


VOYSEY 


30 


“ Mrs. Detmond ! ” But Voysey recovered himself. 

“Ah, Mrs. Detmond,” he said. “And you have shown 

Mrs. Detmond ? ” 

“ Into the study, sir. The lamp was lighted.” 

Voysey turned to the chimney-piece and put down his ciga- 
rette. “ Very good. Nelson,” he said. “ I will come to Mrs. 
Detmond.” 


VII 


In the quiet that fell upon the room when the reconciliation 
was over, Voysey had a moment of recovery. There was a 
pause, in which he had time to become conscious of his own 
exaltation, to become aware not merely of the effect of remote- 
ness the memory of their parting had already gained, but of 
the sense of a new situation that was shaping itself and being 
defined. The scene that had passed had left the air of the 
room, its stillness, its shadows, charged with currents of emo- 
tion. It was clear to him almost before the sound of her 
sobs had ceased, and his eye had grown accustomed to the 
vivid way in which the whiteness of her face stood out against 
the background of shadow, that it was not the past they were 
about to recover, that they were approaching the threshold of 
a new phase, in which the drama would become more intense. 
It was an effect of his exaltation that the issues appeared to 
have grown larger: they seemed for the moment to his imagi- 
nation to be much more than personal ; it was as if he had 
the sense of some deep demand of momentous human impli- 
cation that was now being formulated for him. The impres- 
sion was obscure, and may only have meant that the memories 
and associations of the room were pressing their claim, asking 
him to remember the past, their past, his own past, to remem- 
ber and give effect to the religion of pity, with which in their 
presence he had always lived. 

Emily was sitting by the fire. The green-shaded reading- 
lamp had been moved to the edge of the writing-table that 
now, as in Dr. Voysey’s time, made the central convenience 
of the room, and though it drove the shadows back from but 

302 


VOYSEY 


303 


a small circle about it, its light just reached a corner of the 
white cloth on the tray Nelson had placed on a chair beside 
her. She had been an incredible number of hours without 
food, and so weak and lamentable was her condition when she 
came, that to procure the tray had been Voysey’s first solici- 
tude. He himself was standing before the fire, leaning upon 
the chimney-piece, under the print of the Italian gentleman. 
The room was perfectly still. The outer swing-door banished 
all vagrant sounds of laughter or voices that might have reached 
them from the servants below, and the massive shelves that 
mounted before the folding-doors made inaudible even the 
movements of Nelson, who in the next room was clearing 
away. If there had been any sounds to come from outside, 
and even in summer, on the nights when windows were open, 
the murmur from the streets was vague, the folds of the high, 
drawn curtains would have caught them. The intimacy of 
the room was complete — and for Voysey it was the intimacy 
of a room that had long been a home of the spirit ; and it was 
really this, he felt, rather than the surprise of her unexpected 
appearance, that gave her presence there its peculiar strangeness. 

Presently, Emily having put down her glass, he stepped to 
the tray and filled it for her. She took it from him, and, 
having taken it, held up her other hand. 

‘‘You are cold still,” he said. 

“ It’s such a night.” 

“ And the hours you were wandering about ! Where in the 
world did you go ? ” 

She tried to tell him. Her narrative was vague and devious, 
just as her wanderings had been, but he gained from it an im- 
pression of dim streets with a perspective of frosty roadway 
gleaming white between lines of gas-lamps, alternating with 
sudden returns to crowded pavements where shops were still 
lighted and busy, which proved that her experience had been 
neither less forlorn nor less wretched than his conjecture had 


304 


VOYSEY 


depicted it. He had never seen her so tired, so white, so changed, 
so far removed from her exuberant look of well-being. To 
meet the exceptional rigours of the season, she had been obliged 
to have recourse for once to ‘ things ’ she had long had by her, 
and now the loosening of her wraps, the turning up of her veil 
over her forehead (a little measure that often adds many years 
to a face, and invariably does it injustice), heightened the dis- 
advantage with which she had set out, and which her wander- 
ings had not diminished. He felt, as he watched her, she was 
terribly the woman of her letters. But what moved him most 
poignantly was a feeling she gave him, when she happened to 
turn her face to the light, that his recollection of it was not 
quite accurate : was it that there were lines he had not noticed 
before, or that the lines he had noticed looked deeper ? Some- 
thing to-night seemed to have passed from her face he was 
accustomed to see there ; something was there it had never 
occurred to him he would find. In experience, if not in 
years, she was older really than he had ever thought her ; she 
had gone through more, had lost more, life had taken more 
out of her. And, in his present mood, in the exaltation in 
which the scene that was over had left him, her loss stood out 
as a gain : of late life had seemed to be doing too much for 
her — it pleased him better to see her like this, she touched 
him more nearly. The largeness of his own responsibility for 
her loss by no means escaped him, but the perception of it 
seemed to strengthen the impulses secretly at work, ministered 
to his sense that the only way out for them must lie finally 
through the more he himself must do for her. 

“ Arthur went to Leeds the day before yesterday on busi- 
ness,” she ended by saying. ‘‘ He won’t be back for another 
couple of days.” 

She put her glass down, returned her plate to the tray, 
brushed the crumbs from her lap. Then she lay back in the 
chair and looked up at him. 


VOYSEY 


305 


“ Are you angry with me ? ” 

“ Angry ? ” 

“ For coming.” 

“ Angry with you for coming ? Your coming is an immense 
relief.” 

She was still looking at him. Her expression grew finer. 
It was as if already she realized she had secured a larger 
experience of him upon which to draw, and felt the advantage 
this gave her. 

“ Why did you do it ? ” 

He made a vague gesture. 

“ I feel somehow, I know.” 

“ I wonder ” 

“It was something like — wasn’t it? — like that time — 

you know ” 

“ At Morebay ? ” 

“ Wasn’t it ? ” 

“ Well, perhaps : something like that.” 

“ But you would have come back ? ” 

He smiled. “ Not just yet, I think.” 

“You would in the end, Bertie.” 

“ You mean that has been your feeling ? ” 

“ All along ! ” 

“ But your letters ! I should scarcely have said from your 
letters ’’ 

“ Oh, when I wrote ! That’s different. But I have always 

known, really ” 

“ I should never keep it up ! ” 

“ That we should come together again. If you were a 
woman you would understand.” 

“ You think a woman always knows ? ” 

“ No, not always, I don’t suppose.” 

“ But certain things ? ” 

“ No, not always ; not at first.” 


3o6 


VOYSEY 


“ But when, as between us, there has been ” 

She nodded her head. She smiled as she lay back in the 
chair and looked up at him. And the little movement at the 
corners of her mouth gave a deeper meaning to her smile. 
He divined that in her perception of the dependence of the 
present upon the past there was something like a sense of 
irony, and he recognized the fine advantage she had gained. 

He looked away. He experienced a vague discomfort. His 
sense of security had received an unexpected shock. He was 
seized with a sudden doubt, he was penetrated with an old 
misgiving. He felt that the ghost of the old feminine elu- 
siveness in her, which he believed to be securely laid, was 
once more rising before him j she was eluding him, slipping 
from his mental grasp, retreating into the intricacies of the 
feminine maze. She was making some subtle return. And 
if a return, good Lord! upon what — but the ultimate sin- 
cerity of her passion ? 

When, however, he looked again, the smile had faded from 
her lip. Her face, as her head rested upon the back of her 
chair, was still and white ; in looking up at him she had 
turned a little from the lamp, and the shadow upon her eyes 
was deepened by the protruding folds of the veil pushed up on 
her forehead. He again noticed the difference : only now it 
was no longer a something less, it was wholly a something 
more. The something that had come into her face was a ques- 
tion, and that the deepest, the most intimate, the most terrible, 
one human being can ask of another. Her share of life, her 
chance of happiness, her draft upon the world, which she had 
committed to his keeping — what had he done with them for 
her ? What had he made of her chance of life I what had he 
made of her ! That was the matter between them, that was 
the question at issue, and not only as between a woman and a 
man, but as between one human being and another. He 
could have laughed at his misgiving of a moment ago, at the 


VOYSEY 


307 


infinite pitifulness of it, so immensely had the horizon wid- 
ened. He found for the tray a place behind the lamp, and 
this at the same time he set further back upon the writing- 
table, and took the chair by her side. She raised her head ; 
he put his arm at the back of it. 

“ Ah, dearest ! he cried. 

She drew him to her and kissed him. 

“ Where are we now ? ” 

“Together again,” she murmured. “Back again, back 
again ! ” 

“ And you knew all along ? ” 

“That this wasn’t the end? Yes, all along. It couldn’t 
have ended like that. How could it ? There was nothing to 
make it. What had I done ? . . . If you had changed . . . 
If there had been any one else . . . But I never thought it 
was that — though I have been fearfully jealous, haven’t I ? I 
know — and you have hated it so. But it doesn’t matter what 
one says. One can’t explain. It’s something one feels. 
There’s something at the bottom of it one always comes back 
to — something that’s always there. I only know this : I love 
you, darling, I love you; — and you have made me horribly 
unhappy. No one has ever made me go through what you 
have — no, never ! But kiss me, dearest, kiss me again ” — she 
put back her head so that he could reach her throat — “ there 
— in the old place.” 

He kissed her, he responded to her with a passion intensified 
by his sense of his immeasurable debt to her, of the reproach 
of his long infidelity, of his present urgent need to atone for 
it. Her caresses were a refuge, an escape from the question, 
a suspension of memory, a postponement of his answer to the 
great demand he felt was being formulated for him. Her 
physical languor gave a finer quality of tenderness to her 
caresses ; her face, in which there was still no colour, expressed 
the passion of a deep content. 


3o8 


VOYSEY 


“ Oh, how I have wanted to feel your arms about me again,” 
she murmured. “ How I have wanted your kisses ! ” 

The minutes passed, the stillness deepened ; in the shadowy 
silence their reconciliation grew more intense ; all the miseries 
of the past days, the burden of their failure, their frustration, 
their estrangement, appeared to be sinking into depths below 
them, into merciful depths beneath waves of oblivion, as a 
body, buried by night, sinks beneath a moonlit sea. And in 
the radiant calm that had fallen and seemed to lie upon their 
spiritual surface, their relief at the dreadful riddance was 
touched with something like the feeling of those who have 
assisted at a pious rite, who have the sanction of a solemn 
office. It was at least the richest silence they had known, the 
one that was best for them, the one in which they drew nearest 
to each other. But still the minutes passed, and even into 
their beautiful dim world of illusion the hard light of the 
actual at last broke. It was as if the very preciousness and 
rarity of the passing moment made them aware of its transience, 
while the instant they returned to reality the need for facing 
the situation and dealing with it rose up and confronted them 
with a startling clearness of definition like an object seen 
suddenly in the light. Like people but half awake, they ex- 
perienced a bewilderment, a loss of courage, a desire for a 
little respite and delay. Only, her reluctance to face the issue 
was an effect of surprise rather than misgiving, was momentary 
and meant very little; her acquiescence, when he made a 
movement to withdraw his arm and she offered no resistance, 
was the expression of a fine security. 

He rose from the chair ; he stood for a moment leaning upon 
the chimney-piece, then he took a turn down the room. 

Her eyes followed him. 

“ What room is this ? ” she asked. ‘‘ I don’t think I have 
seen it before.” 

“ It was my father’s consulting-room. It’s my den now.” 


VOYSEY 


309 


“ And what’s that door ? Is that another room ? ” 

‘‘ That ? It was my father’s laboratory. He sometimes 
made examinations or did small experiments in there. It has 
a special arrangement for the light.” 

He paused in the shadow by the bookshelves. He found 
himself waiting for what she might say with a curiously intense 
desire that her answer should strike the right note. 

“ It is your room — are you here much ? ” 

“Yes, a good deal. I come at night.” 

There was a pause. He felt it was expressive. He felt 
that she was not quite herself, that she was more than herself, 
that she was rising above the usual limitations of her sym- 
pathy. Her voice betrayed that she was being moved by 
something of his own exaltation. 

“ You come at night ? ” 

“Every night — unless I happen to get home very late.” 

“ Alone ? ” 

“Alone — but I am not without company.” 

He waited again. He found her interest a keen satisfac- 
tion. He was almost pathetically anxious that this moment 
in which a better comprehension seemed at last to be at hand 
should not be spoiled by the jarring note which had spoiled so 
many of their attempts at intimacy. 

“ People came every morning, I suppose, to see your father 
— every morning — all the year round ? ” 

“ Yes, every morning. He was seldom away. His holi- 
days never amounted to much.” 

Then, after an interval of a moment, he added, still standing 
by the shelves, — 

“ You feel the perverse fascination ? ” 

“I should think sometimes ” she hesitated. 

“ Sometimes — at night, perhaps ? ” 

“ When you sit here alone — if you think about things at 
all ” 


310 


VOYSEY 


“ I think a good deal of those people ? Yes, that’s it. One 
never forgets them for very long. And really one doesn’t 
much want to. One feels as if it would be a kind of cruelty, 
in a way, not to spare them a thought now and then. They 
were often so wretched ! ” 

« So ill ” 

“ So ill, and so wretched, and often so pathetically, so 
irreparably, disappointed.” 

Emily rose from her chair. He turned at the sound of the 
movement. He wondered a little what she would do. She 
came to the shelves. 

For a minute or two, but minutes that seemed very long, 
she stood there reading, on volume after volume, with a fas- 
cination that was the product of repulsion, if not of actual 
terror, the titles that told with the brevity of their few gilt 
letters the pitiful and dreadful tale of the ghastly possibilities 
of existence. Diseases of women, diseases of children, dis- 
eases that can’t wait even for our birth, diseases of the mind, 
diseases that mar and maim and mutilate, that poison and 
canker and consume and make offensive to every sense, dis- 
eases that reduce sentience to an agony and a vile disgust — 
there was enough in those grim titles to make these desperate 
conditions of mortality stand out from the shelves like spectral 
presences, like weird embodiments of the haunting associations 
of the room. There was enough to bring these conditions 
home, to suggest to the imagination a new direction in which 
to play round “ the chances of life,” and rob that fine phrase 
of its last shred of cheerful meaning ; to cover, if but for a 
moment, the impulses of passion with an effect of extinction 
and coldness and dread. Chances of happiness, pleasures of 
youth, pleasures of the senses, the joy of living, pleasure and 
laughter and love ! — there was enough to call up against them 
all the truths and the platitudes by which, with an infinite 
variety of pathetic and beautiful metaphor, prophets and preach- 


VOYSEY 


311 

ers of every age have warned us off from the feast of life and 
proclaimed its intolerable ills. Then, suddenly, she turned 
away and flung herself into his arms with a movement of 
passionate recoil. It was too hard, too dire, too cruel, this 
writing upon the wall, this sentence upon the instincts of 
humanity. The woman in her revolted. The mother in her 
cried out against the outrage to the instinct of her sex — that 
instinct that is the deepest of all, that is all for life, that will 
have life go on, go on, go on, yes, at any price, even at the 
price of possibilities like these. 

She clung to him, she pressed him to her with a passionate 
need to recover the sense of his love, the assurance that the 
world of love and of life was still there. She clung to him 
like a child frightened by the dark j the mysteries and terrors 
of existence had drawn too near to her, she clung to him for 
a refuge and escape. They were too much for her, these 
terrors, too much for her courage, too stern in their rebuke, 
but she had risen above herself in seeing them. And with 
Voysey, for whom the writing upon the wall was a familiar 
legend, and who long ago had given in his acceptance of its 
direst meaning, the thought of her defencelessness, of the little 
he could do for her, of the keener exposure which was all any 
contact with him could bring her, deepened the power of her 
demand, the strength of her claim, the pity of the futility of 
her appeal. What little could be done he would do for her ; 
never had the meaning of her claim come home to him as it 
came home to-night. 

She put back her head and released him a little. He saw 
the tears gathering in her eyes. 

‘‘ Bertie, Bertie, take me away, take me away,” she pleaded, 
“ to-morrow — before he comes back. I can’t go on like 
this ; it’s impossible, it’s killing me ; you don’t know what I 
have gone through. That’s what I have come for to-night — 
I have thought it all out — it’s the only way. I will meet you 


3*2 


VOYSEY 


to-morrow anywhere you like : in the afternoon, I suppose ; 
and we will go away — I don’t mind where : go abroad per- 
haps : I am ready, and then some day — he will set us free, I 
suppose. Oh, I know, I know what you are going to say ! 
Don’t say it, darling, don’t say it. There is no need to. I 
know I shall lose, lose ... he will keep . . .” 

“Yes, he will keep the boy,” he said. 

“Oh, I know — I know — I know.” The tears came, 
the sobs rose in her throat, her head dropped on his shoulder ; 
it was some moments before she could speak. He read the 
change in her, the curious aging of her face, the misery of her 
letters, in a new sense, and felt that she really had eluded him 
after all. He had sounded but half the depth of her passion, 
he had splendidly missed the point of her misery. “ I have 
wanted you both — oh, my God, if I hadn’t got to choose! 
If I could keep you both, if we could go on as we were, and 
perhaps if I hadn’t been fool enough to go down to Hecking- 
den. ... If you would have come in that afternoon when 
I wanted you to . . . but you wouldn’t and that settled it. 
I knew then I had got to choose. I saw it all that night. I 
knew it would never be the same again, though we might try. 
We should only drag on, drag on, and be miserable, till — till 
. . . It has come home to me more and more ; if I am to 
keep you at all, I must have you altogether. There’s no other 
way. When we are together, it will be different. You will be 
different. You won’t have these feelings any more. You will 
be happy. Oh, yes, Bertie, you will be. I know I can make 
you. I would have made you before, but I have never had 
enough of you to try I Darling, I have never had enough of 
you : do you know ? I want every bit of you : I want every 
little tiny bit of you — just simply the whole of your time 
and your love. Oh, we have got a lot of lost time to make 
up for, nights and days ! But when we begin . . . ! Only 
don’t let’s lose any more time now. I’d like to start to-night. 


VOYSEY 


3*3 


I dread going back so. The house is awful. And to-night 
too . . . the last time I shall ever . . . ever in my life . . . 
and in the morning, you know ... in the morning nurse 
will bring him in to me before I am up . . . and to have him 
there on the bed . . . playing . . The sobs rose once 
more and almost choked her. But, desperately recovering her- 
self, and with something like a smile as she looked up into his 
face : “ Don’t think I haven’t made up my mind, darling. I 
have. I have quite decided. To lose you would be worse 
still. It would kill me. If you said you wouldn’t come to-mor- 
row . . . but you will. Tell me now where we shall meet; 
you arrange it all, will you ? ” 

He gently released himself from her and led her back to the 
chair. 

He had turned mortally cold. ■ The sword had fallen. The 
great demand for which he had been waiting, for which he 
had almost fancied the very shadows of the room had been 
waiting, descended upon him like a blow. The last barrier 
was up ; the last protection between him and the extreme con- 
sequence of his folly — her love of the child had been this pro- 
tection — was removed and taken away. And what he was 
conscious of was no desperate impulse of revolt, of repudia- 
tion, of protest or appeal, no impulse to any form of self- 
assertion or self-defence, but a mortal extinction of impulse 
altogether, a mortal want of conviction. 

He left his chair and leaned for a moment on the chimney- 
piece : then started again across the room. This blankness, 
this deadness, this strange failure of energy lay upon him like 
the touch of a mortal chill. The suddenness of his drop from 
the exaltation of the past hour was amazing : never more than 
in that hour had the power of impulse been upon him, had 
life been intense, nor action seemed near to command. Her 
proposal too could not be said to have come with any shock 
of unexpectedness ; their reconciliation carried this determina- 


VOYSEY 


3H 

tion in it as a flower carries its fruit. And it wasn’t that he 
had recovered his lucidity. He wasn’t thinking things out ; 
the future was vague ; his imagination was not filling in the 
details ; he was aware of no failure of illusion, no intrusion of 
the past, no check from the remembrance of the old incom- 
patibility. All that was in any way clear to his apprehension 
in this little interval — in the little space while he took his 
turn down the room before he returned to her chair and 
declared his decision — was his consciousness of a stunned 
and dizzy sense of an immeasurable and irreparable loss, of 
the passing upon him of a sentence by which life was practi- 
cally closed, and against which there was not the faintest 
possibility of appeal. It was a moment of despair so pro- 
found, of anguish so intense, that it had as it were by the very 
impossibility of its continuance the power to effect his relief. 
For suddenly he soared again, — almost as suddenly as he had 
fallen from it, — to that impassioned state of exaltation: 
impulse returned ; the blankness and deadness were no more ; 
from mere acquiescence, from passivity, from hesitation, he 
found himself borne away by an overwhelming and determin- 
ing recoil. It was the return of the impulse which the misery 
of the past days had engendered, which the memories of the 
room, his sensitiveness to their claim, his response to the past, 
quickened and strengthened with irresistible energy, from 
which the pity of her supreme appeal lifted the last reluctance : 
— the impulse to surrender and pay his debt to her and once and 
for all to atone. And upon his finally yielding to the impulse 
there followed an experience of which he had had no sort of 
prevision : there swept over him a wave of tumultuous joy, a 
new and intensified consciousness of living, a confidence in 
life, an extraordinary feeling of release from his lifelong appre- 
hensions and misgivings. He returned to her side, he took 
her in his arms, he kissed her on the lips, he gave her the 
assurance of his unqualified acceptance of her decision. 


VOYSEY 


315 


« To morrow, to-morrow,” he cried, “ we will begin ! We 
will see whether something famous can^t be wrung out of 
life, after all, by two people who know how to deal with it ! ” 

They were still well up upon the heights of this brave 
decision of theirs, when, a quarter of an hour later, after a 
rough draft of their plans had been drawn, they left the house, 
and Voysey took her to the station. They had arranged to 
meet the next evening where they had met a fortnight ago, 
before Emily’s visit to her mother; they would dine together; 
they would take the night train ; they would cross to Calais ; 
they would make Paris the first stage towards the southern 
goal of their journey. Beyond Paris, the outlines of their plan 
were a trifle vague ; Paris, however, was quite far enough to 
make the purpose of their journey irreparable. And so at 
Portland Road they parted ; it was late, Emily refused Voysey’s 
offer to see her to her own station. 

And he was still well up upon the heights with the joy and 
the rich sense of living still predominant over the wonder and 
bewilderment of it, when he returned along the dim pavement 
of Harley Street, past the patches of wintry whiteness the 
gas-lamps painted on the roadway, and regained his own door. 
He hung his great-coat in the hall and went straight to the 
study. He was still in a region so remote from the small 
contingencies of the domestic life that the discovery of Nell in 
the arm-chair, though a circumstance the simplest in the world, 
startled him with a shock as of some more than natural inter- 
vention. 

An exclamation escaped him. 

“ I have been waiting for you, Bertie,” she said. 

“ You knew I was out ? ” 

She didn’t answer for a moment. 

“Nelson, I suppose ?” 

She still hesitated ; when she spoke it was with a voice by 


3i6 


VOYSEY 


whose imperfect control the extent of her hesitation might be 
measured. 

‘‘ No, I saw you go out, Bertie.” 

He had reached the hearthrug. He looked at her. 

“ I was just coming down-stairs,” was her apology. 

The hour that followed, or rather the hours that followed, 
for it was by a cold hearth and a failing lamp that their talk 
was continued, left Nell a deeper and an older woman. Deep 
was her distress ; deep was her dismay ; pitiable was her 
bewilderment at this intrusion into her experience of a wrong 
so terrible, a wretchedness so great. Never, it appeared to her 
distressed and dismayed young judgment, could even these 
walls have listened to a confession more profoundly at variance 
with the faith of her fearless expectations. It was a dreadful 
falsification of her faith, her experience, her respect, her 
devotion, her love. Upon her too a blankness and deadness 
descended, a sense of irreparable loss. As she listened, 
nothing seemed left ; it all seemed to be passing away from 
her together, her innocent delight in life and the world, her 
great faith that everything was getting so much better. The 
aspect under which things had at last come up between them 
was one impossible to accept : for once the plea of the difficulty 
of things, by which as by a kind of inner illumination she 
walked and lived, brought her no help, shed no light for her ; 
the rectitude of her nature declared against the admission of 
this plea as against a trifling with all that was honest and of 
good repute. And yet, little by little, as she listened, as he 
touched her imagination, as he played upon her emotion, as 
he possessed her interest, as he directed her insight, that old 
feeling of hers stole back again — the feeling she had experi- 
enced so often before — the feeling how impossible it is to 
reject this plea without rejecting the best we know. Once 
more to-night the memories and associations of the room 
pressed their claim j for her too its shadows had a meaning 


VOYSEY 


317 


and a message — the message of mercy that the miseries of the 
past had left in them, and which it was now her turn to read. 
At all events it became clear to her that what mattered most 
was not the right and the wrong of it — that what mattered 
most was the infinite pity. 

And of this she made him tenderly aware when, before they 
parted for the night, she made him understand that whatever 
her loss might prove to be, it included nothing of her affection. 

“ So we stand where we did, Nell,” he ended by saying. 
Then, with something like an attempt at his old humour, ‘‘Ah, 
the new ideas,” he laughed, “ they have done something for 
me, I suspect: they are in it for something — aren’t they, 
Nell .? ” 

“ We stand where we did, where we always shall stand, 
Bertie,” she said. “But it’s not the new ideas, dear, — it’s 
the old ones ! It’s just the very oldest of all ! ” 


VIII 


But Emily and Voysey never went. 

The next morning, after breakfast, when Voysey, to meet 
one of the more obvious claims of his position, was wondering 
how he might, to some small extent at all events, prepare the 
mind of Miss Voysey, poor dear woman, for the predicament 
in which his startling disappearance would leave her, he re- 
ceived from Emily a telegram that abruptly arrested his im- 
mediate plans by urgently summoning him to Bedford Park. 

A red, glowing, wintry sun, embedded in leaden folds of 
blurring mist, was giving the wintry whiteness of the Green a 
kind of raw and ineffectual encouragement when once more he 
crossed it, about twelve o’clock. Panes of the white-framed 
windows of one or two of the villas were being reddened by 
the sun as if it had been the sun of a sunset ; there was a 
little life on the Green, a few people were moving on the 
asphalt paths ; there was a little life in the roadway, both by 
the villas and near the station, from the morning traffic of the 
tradesmen’s carts : but the frost on the trees in the gardens of 
the villas and on the embankment had no sparkle in the dreary 
leaden whiteness of the mist, which to Voysey seemed really 
less genial than the yellow and lamplit darkness of the fog he 
had left behind him up in London. 

The conjectures — and they had covered a pretty wide range 
— to which he had delivered himself during his journey from 
Portland Road, took a definite direction when, upon approach- 
ing the posts in the railings near the Detmonds’ house, he saw 
a brougham standing by the pavement. Just as he was on the 

318 


VOYSEY 


319 


point of opening the gate in the wooden palings the front-door 
was opened, and down the diminutive garden came a man, the 
alertness of whose step, with its suggestion of other visits to 
be paid, left Voysey in no doubt as to his profession. Ellen, 
who had seen him from the porch, kept the door open. On a 
chair in the hall Voysey noticed the bundle of a stick and an 
umbrella strapped up in a rug with a pink evening paper under 
one of the straps. 

“ Mr. Detmond has come back ?” he inquired. 

“Yes, sir; master came back last night.” 

He was shown to the drawing-room. Emily, whom the 
doctor, no doubt, had just left, was standing by the fire. 

She received him as if he had just stepped from another 
room. She received him without change of expression. 

“ He has come back,” he said. 

She looked at him for a second or two almost blankly. He 
saw that she was as white as she had been the night before, 
and that she appeared still more tired. Her expression dis- 
couraged any tenderer approach. He continued to take off 
his glove. 

“ Yes, I found him here when I got home last night.” 

“ And he has come back ill ? ” 

“ He has been ill all night. I have been up with him. He 
has been in dreadful pain. It comes on in paroxysms. Ellen 
went for the doctor directly after breakfast — you met him at 
the gate just now.” 

A little at a loss, Voysey came to the fire. Her manner 
gave him a feeling as if she had not quite realized he had 
come ; she seemed to have no sense at all of his expectation. 
And he interpreted her strangeness as an effect of excitement 
contending with an immense fatigue. He put his gloves in 
his pocket and undid the buttons of his coat. 

“ Wasn’t he a little surprised to find you out last night ? ” 

“ I suppose he was rather. But he was too bad to trouble 


320 


VOYSEY 


much about It. I managed to make something up. He knows 
I have wired to you.” 

‘‘ What Is It ? ” he asked. 

“Some kind of Internal Inflammation.” 

“ Inflammation ? Did the doctor tell you what they call 
It ? ” 

“Typh — typh something or other, I think.” 

“ Typhlitis, perhaps ? ” 

Her expression changed. “Yes, that’s It. You have 
heard of It, then ? ” There was a new Interest In her voice. 

“ Oh yes, I have heard of It ; It’s nothing very un- 
common.” 

“You have known some one who has had It ? ” 

“ A young fellow we knew had It once.” 

“ It comes on quite suddenly.” 

“ So I suppose.” 

“With a dreadful pain. He has had a great deal of 
pain.” 

“ It Is a very painful thing, I believe.” 

“ He seems to be In pain still. The doctor says he must 
have a nurse,” she added. “ He Is going to send one. I 
expect she will be here this afternoon : I suppose about tea- 
time, most probably.” 

She leaned upon the chimney-piece. The note of Interest 
passed from her voice. The momentary eagerness passed 
from her face. Her attitude was one of utter weariness, an 
attitude of utter prostration. The weight of an Immense 
fatigue seemed to be descending upon her, to be overwhelm- 
ing her, to be obliterating all Impressions. And for Voysey 
the eflFect of this was the peculiar one of making him more 
aware of the consciousness of something a little unreal, or at 
least a little unexpected, a little Improbable, In her Interest, In 
her emotion — for In her mention of the pain just now there 
had been emotion, the emotion of sympathy. It occurred to 


VOYSEY 


321 


him that the deepening of her prostration just at that moment 
had for one of its causes a failure of this emotion, the coming 
of a sudden doubt, the return of a different feeling. He had 
the sense of the passing away of something from between 
them, of the occurrence of an opening for a nearer approach. 

“You are very tired,” he said. “Do sit down, dear. You 
are so tired you can hardly stand. You have had a very bad 
time. Sit down for a few minutes. Come to the sofa.” 

She slightly shook her head. 

“ Oh yes, come along,” he urged her. 

But the effect of his urging was to produce a movement of 
recoil. 

“ Well, have this chair, then.” And he pushed a small 
chair to the hearthrug. 

She made an effort, however, and roused herself. “ No, I 
can’t sit down,” she said. “ I must go to Ellen. There are 
a number of things to be seen to. I must speak to her about 
getting a room ready for the nurse.” 

He divined that there was more in her effort than the desire 
to meet even such demands as these, important as no doubt 
they were, and he abstained from any attempt to keep her. 
The something that had stood between them just now was 
passing, she quite realized he was there, the set of the current 
of her emotion had changed since he had come into the room : 
he felt she knew that he saw this, and he divined that, what- 
ever precisely her motive might be, her effort had some inten- 
tion of self-defence. 

“ I will go to Ellen now. I hear her in the hall,” she 
said. And turning from the fire, she hurried across the 
room, and called to Ellen, who seemed to be passing the 
door. 

He remained by the fire ; but newly lighted, it was still 
bright with the crispness of the flames of the wood with 
which it had been laid, as well as with the gas of the coal. 

Y 


322 


VOYSEY 


In spite of the morning sun that made a faint glow upon the 
diamond panes, the air of the room was raw, while the white- 
ness of the frost and the mist outside was giving a cheerless 
crudity to the light. It was a light to make the objects in 
the room, their materials and surfaces, their textures and 
colours, the glaze of the vases, the polish of the cabinet, the 
glint on the palm, declare themselves with a curious dull cold- 
ness and definiteness that, after the less ungenial obscurity of 
the fog he had left, appeared to Voysey singularly repellent. 
The door was open, and the sound of Emily’s voice came from 
across the hall ; she had taken Ellen into the dining-room. 

He was very completely at a loss. And the odd thing was, 
he had a feeling that in a certain sense he ought not to be at 
a loss. As a matter of fact he felt curiously alert. His ex- 
altation of the night before had not passed. He was still 
upon the crest of the wave. There had been no reaction, no 
unbending of the bow, no coming down from the heights. 
He was where they had left off yesterday. Since he woke 
(and his night had not been a long one) he had been thinking 
things out, had been busy with the more urgent details of their 
scheme, had been possessed by the preparations for their flight 
as one is possessed by a fixed idea. Now, in these first mo- 
ments, as he stood alone by the fire and looked blankly about 
him, what he was most conscious of was the sense of having 
been brought too suddenly to a standstill — of having been 
pulled up much too abruptly, when indeed he had been going 
very fast. Just in these first few minutes he didn’t get much 
beyond this ; that Emily had received a tremendous shock, 
and that, for himself, this sudden intervention, this arrest of 
their flight, did not wear the aspect which, could he have fore- 
seen this precise development, he knew he would have ex- 
pected it to wear — it did not wear the aspect of a reprieve. 

Emily left the dining-room, crossed the hall, and came back 
to him : she came back to the fire-place. 


VOYSEY 


323 


“ Ah, you are dreadfully tired,” he said. ‘‘ Do rest a little 

— oh, but you really must.” 

He drew the chair up for her again ; — and his persuasion 
prevailed. 

“ I feel worn out,” she admitted. 

“You have had a very bad time.” 

She lay back in the chair. “ It has brought on neuralgia,” 
she said. 

“ Ah, you poor thing ! ” 

Her effort, whatever its intention, was pretty much ex- 
hausted, he felt. The time had come to try to get rid of what 
still remained of the suggestion of a strangeness between them ; 
it was time for them to take account — and take account 
together, as it were — of the change that had come in their 
position. 

“ I got your telegram at the right moment,” he said. “ It 
was a delicate matter, but I was just on the point ” 

She stopped him. “We couldn’t now — could we?” she 
broke in. 

“ No, you couldn’t leave him like this. It would be 
horrible.” 

“ You feel it would, too ? ” 

“ Oh yes, it would be horribly cruel.” 

“ It seemed somehow — as if one couldn’t do it,” she said. 

“No, we couldn’t do it; we must wait.” And as she 
offered no answer to this, mechanically he repeated the word 

— “We must wait,” he said. 

But, in her silence, upon repetition, he had a sudden sense 
that the word sounded very loud. It seemed to hang upon the 
air ; her silence seemed, as it were, to give it back to him, like 
some ominous effect of an echo. It was an effect as ominous, 
as oppressive, as melancholy, as the sound of a tolling bell. 
And, suddenly, he perceived what it was that had really 
happened, he had an intuition of what the change in her really 


3^4 


VOYSEY 


meant, of what the night must have shown her, of the things 
she must have seen, in the dreadful illumination of the 
darkness. 

He went to the window. In the last few minutes the mist 
had thickened. It had encroached upon the garden. It had 
drawn near to the house. The Green, the railings, the road- 
way were lost in its leaden folds ; the privet hedge within the 
wooden palings made only a dim blurred line. The glow of 
the sun had passed away altogether, and little as it had added 
to the cheerfulness of the day, the mist seemed dingier without 
it. And upon Voysey, in his consciousness at once of a 
quickened mental activity and of the weight of a strange 
oppression, the effect these things produced was that of an 
insistent, of an almost intolerable reality. There was a 
wretchedness in the crude broad morning light ; the blank 
staring mid-day had something of terror in it j the light gave 
a precision to his thoughts that afflicted him, his presentiment 
seemed to take shape against the dismal background of the 
mist almost like a visible figure. 

He left the window, and returned to the fire-place where 
Emily, in the same attitude of weariness and dejection, made 
a contrast to the cheerfulness of the flames. In the cold light 
which lay upon every object in the room, he noticed that the 
whiteness of her face was less vivid, less effective, was of a 
duller and sallower tone, than it had been among the shadows 
of the lamplight : but to his fancy it was still more pathetic, 
more poignant, more distressing ; the look that had seemed to 
him last night to be asking so cruel a question, that terrible 
look of an aging and accusing experience, touched him more 
nearly still. At the same time it reminded him of the scene 
that had passed between them, and in the deepening blankness 
of the present he found himself regretting that scene with its 
lurid and passionate intensity. He would have liked to recall 
it to her, he would have liked at all events to escape from the 


VOYSEY 


325 

oppression of the sense that the scene was a scene that was 
closed. But all he was capable actually of saying to her 
was — 

“ Is it very bad, then — the neuralgia ? ” 

The tone of his voice, however, made up for the poverty of 
his effort. A look dawned in her eyes that had the effect of a 
kind of reawakening as it were — that he interpreted at once 
as a recognition of his claim, and an appeal to him to forbear 
and not press it. He felt that she, too, was going back to 
their scene, and that she, too, was baffled by the sense that it 
was impossible now to reopen it. She looked at him in this 
way for some moments j then, quietly, she turned her eyes 
away, and he saw the tears were gathering. 

“ It has been a great shock to you,” he said. 

She controlled herself, however; and in a moment, asked, 
and with a jarring absence of transition — 

“Didn’t you say just now a friend of yours had had the 
same thing ? ” 

The question startled him. 

“Did I say so? Yes, a friend of ours had it some years 
ago.” 

She looked up at him. 

“ I suppose he was very ill ? ” 

He hesitated. To gain time he stooped and stirred the 
fire. Then, seeing that evasion was hopeless and not quite 
sure that it was necessary, he simply told her. 

“ The case was a particularly bad one. So at least my 
father, I understood, said at the time. He was not called in, 
but our friends told him about it. They lived in the country. 
And the doctor they had was not much good.” 

He waited ; he was conscious of a morbid and perverse 
desire to finish his story, to put the matter in the plainest 
words. And he felt, as he waited, Emily had a similar 
desire. 


326 


VOYSEY 


“ Your father told you about it, I suppose ? ” 

“ I fancy there wasn’t very much to tell.” 

“ He was not ill very — very long ? ” 

“ I don’t remember how long ; less than a fortnight, I 
think. But, as I said,” he hastened to add, “ the case was a 
particularly bad one. It is a thing people usually get over.” 

He glanced at her again ; he wasn’t sure how she was 
taking it. He wasn’t sure of much more than this : that she 
had the air of a woman who is at the end of her strength, 
at the end of her store of emotion. Her weariness was a 
weariness of the kind that makes all impressions blurred. He 
doubted whether she herself really knew just what it was she 
was feeling. 

He turned once more to the window. The mist was 
thicker, dingier, nearer. The whole garden lay under its 
dreary pall. And still from out of it came the sounds of 
morning life : the sound of invisible footsteps on the asphalt 
of the pavement, and, across the Green, from the embank- 
ment, the sound of an approaching train, with, quite suddenly, 
with an effect of startling nearness, the sullen detonation of a 
fog-signal. 


IX 


He had lighted the lamp, that evening, later than usual : — 
the sky was bright, the days had drawn away from the shortest, 
the ceiling still held something of the whiteness of the frost 
outside for some time after the dusk had fallen ; but the 
nurse, who stood upon the regulations of the modern system 
and required them to be respected, would not come on duty 
till eight o’clock, and there were still two more to be added to 
the interminable hours before Voysey would get his release. 

They were hours of wretchedness ; they were hours of 
recollection ; they were hours of an intolerable lucidity. — The 
illness now had reached the sixth day, and each day, for his 
presentiment at least, if not for science, had been a day of 
diminished hope. Indeed the doctor, at his last visit, paid 
early in the afternoon, had permitted himself to speak with a 
much deeper seriousness of his patient, warning Emily that if 
the improvement, for which, however, he still persisted in 
wishing an opening to be left, had not occurred when he called 
again, a second opinion would be necessary. To Voysey he 
had further confided that the second opinion must be that of a 
surgeon he named. The three or four hours that had passed 
since this communication had brought no encouragement ; and 
for Voysey, who was little given to clutching at straws, whose 
response to the inevitable was peremptory, with whom the door 
of hope was liable only too soon to fall to, the operation in its 
certitude had already for his imagination shaped itself into a 
new terror. 

A terrible, unnatural stillness had descended in these days 

327 


328 


VOYSEY 


upon the house. It was a stillness of which, with the fall of 
the night, he became so much more aware, that it was percep- 
tibly his dread of it that had made him reluctant to light the 
lamp in a vain, weak clinging to the daylight. The blind was 
still unlowered, and though the last of the daylight had yielded 
and even the bars in the west had gone out, and there was 
little more to be seen than the signals on the embankment and 
the lamps in the roadway, his returns to the window were 
frequent. It was not the stillness that is the mere effect of 
an abated and muffled activity, though that would have been 
oppressive enough : it was rather that there had fallen upon 
the house, upon its life, upon its atmosphere, upon the habit- 
ualness of its daily occupations, the sense of a great pause ; 
the sense of a great pause that was also the sense of a deep 
recognition, a silence that was not without sound, but that 
gave to sounds, even the most casual and familiar, a strangeness 
in the hush of an intense pre-occupation. 

It was a silence that of course reached its deepest in the 
sick-room, and at nightfall, when the quiet too of the suburb 
grew deep, it gained for Voysey, who had an ear to catch fine 
intimations, the weight of a terrible oppression. From child- 
hood he had had a shrinking from sick-rooms he had never 
been able to overcome, and the mere unfamiliarity of his office 
tended to make the oppression deeper. It quickened his 
imagination, it intensified the impressions to whose power he 
was conscious he impotently surrendered from the moment he 
entered the villa. There was the passing of the trains, and 
there were occasional footsteps on the pavement, but in the 
house itself he heard nothing but the low crooning murmur 
of the child’s voice, who was singing to himself in a room on 
the other side of the passage. 

He had been standing by the window for some minutes ; 
the whiteness of the Green had the effect, in the light of an 
imperfect young moon that made it just visible, of a stretch of 


VOYSEY 


329 


snow-covered ice, while the lights about it (which the dimness 
of the room behind permitted him to see) had the cheerfulness 
of lights on a shore. A murmur from Arthur, however, 
presently, drew him to the bed. 

“The soda-and-milk ? Yes, I will get it for you,” he said. 
“ I think the time’s come for it.” The syphon with the 
“feeder” and the milk-jug, the bottle of turpentine for the 
fomentations and a cup and another bottle or two, stood on 
the chest of drawers at the end of the bed, and Voysey went 
to it and mixed the preparation. “ This always strikes me as 
rather an ungenial convenience,” he observed, with a little 
attempt at cheerfulness, as he brought Arthur the feeding-cup. 
“ It suggests an ungenial rejection of cookery ! ” 

Arthur, however, was at so low an ebb that he offered but 
the feeblest response. He was beyond the enjoyment of jokes, 
even the jokes of other people. He raised his head a little 
from the pillow, but he was so weak that he didn’t even trouble 
to put his hands to the feeder which Voysey held for him while 
he drank. 

When he had put the cup on the drawers again, he returned 
to and lingered by the bed. 

“ Is it bad still ?” he asked. 

Arthur’s only answer was a little uneasy movement of his 
head, almost the only movement now he ever made, for he 
kept his body, hour after hour, perfectly still. He lay quite 
flat in the bed, his knees drawn up to relieve the pain. He 
would move his head upon the pillow, and sometimes he 
would raise his arms, but otherwise the position in which 
he lay never changed. Voysey had placed the lamp on the 
washhand-stand that stood against the wall somewhat beyond 
the foot of the bed, and the interposition of his raised knees 
made a deeper shadow that almost reached his face. His face 
was in shadow as it was, for the lamp was shaded and the room 
dim, but there was light enough with the help of the fire for 


330 


VOYSEY 


the change that had come into it to be quite clearly seen. It 
had changed, it seemed to Voysey, even in the last few hours, 
even since the doctor’s visit. The look of roundness and 
smoothness and the oddness of colour, that had provoked so 
much obvious pleasantry, had been an early conquest of the 
illness, but now Voysey felt that the look which had succeeded, 
the worn and pinched and withered look, was growing still 
more pitiable, as certainly the expression of his eyes was be- 
coming more watchful and anxious. This expression of 
anxious watchfulness gave a kind of careworn intensity to his 
features, and at the same time his face had a vagueness in it as 
if he were not so much watching as listening : indeed the idea 
that he was literally listening, listening possibly to the murmur 
of the child who might be disturbing him, occurred to Voysey, 
and with so much force that he presently inquired — 

“Does it worry you — the noise the little fellow’s making 
in the nursery ? ” 

But Arthur shook his head : evidently, the sound but just 
reached him. 

“ Nor the noise of the trains — they don’t bother you ? ” 

“ I don’t mind them,” he murmured. 

“You have heard them so much. Is the lamp as you like 
it ? Shall I turn it up a little ? ” 

“ No, leave it,” he said ; and his feeble voice had a note of 
impatience in it, and he turned his face away. 

Voysey remained by the bed. 

He was conscious of a deepening pity. He had a wretched 
sense that he was missing his chance, the chance to pay just a 
little of his debt with which the development of the illness had 
provided him. The sight of this constant pain was a misery. 
He had always had a deep dread of pain ; a dread due not 
merely to a vivid power of realization in the presence of it, 
but, as it were, to his respect for it, to the high place he gave 
it, to his habitual acceptance and recognition of it, among the 


VOYSEY 


33 


worst possibilities of existence. His own sufferings had been 
mental, and at bottom he had experienced, at most times but 
the worst, he was perfectly aware, a relief at their not being 
physical. 

Arthur’s state, however, gave him small opening for the 
expression of his compassion, little chance for the payment of 
his debt. Little by little the small attempts at a grateful 
cheerfulness, with which at first Arthur had received his at- 
tentions, and distinguished them from those of his wife or the 
nurse, had faded, overwhelmed by the mounting indifference. 
Little by little the pain had deadened and stupefied, had en- 
croached upon and obliterated, had claimed and absorbed, 
all his faculties and powers, until what little of consciousness 
was left seemed concentrated in his response to the anguish of 
his sufferings, and in the anguish of a deep self-pity. He had 
grown pathetically silent, pathetically inexpressive. And yet, 
as Voysey looked at him and read the mysterious watchful- 
ness in his face, he felt that, could he but have spoken, he had 
never had so much to say. It was really his first great chance, 
the first time in life he had ever counted ! For what was he 
watching, for what was he listening ? For what sound of an 
inaudible footstep was his ear strained, what invisible approach 
did he expect ? If only he had had the power to tell them, 
what things these would have been to hear ! But the mys- 
terious secret of the sick is incommunicable and they keep it, 
just as childhood keeps its eternal secrets from one generation 
to another, or as the dead keep theirs. 

Voysey turned away from the bed. 

He took a turn to the window, where he lingered for a 
moment to watch the blurred, flashing lights of a passing train, 
then crossed the shadows of the room again, and dropped into 
a chair by the fire. 

He was possessed by a monstrous sense of incongruity. 
There had risen before his mental eye a vision of the Arthur 


332 


VOYSEY 


of other days, of Arthur as he actually was, Arthur as he had 
always known him, with his hopeless crudity and immaturity, 
his submersion under the platitudes of the average existence, 
his failure ever to find anything out, ever to see through any- 
thing, ever to give his life the value of any really distinct, 
original, individual experience, — and it seemed almost as if he 
had no business to die, as if he had no sufficient claim to the 
dignity. It was a finishing touch to the whole inconsequence 
of his fate that death should come to him so tragically. For 
it was tragic to have lived to so little purpose and yet to be 
dying so painfully. It was tragic to be so deceived in the 
ministrations of those about him : of the wife who had never 
loved him — who had never even tolerated him — never for- 
given him his inadequacy, his failure to appease her imagina- 
tion ; and the friend who had never been any friend at all — 
the idea of whose friendship rested upon a misconception 
altogether — the friend who had never forgiven him an ab- 
surdity. The wife and the friend who had shut him out, who 
had so excluded him from the passionate purposes of their 
lives that it was as if he were dying among strangers. And 
as the burden of these things grew heavier, Voysey’s pity 
increased and his remorse increased, and he saw his part in 
the deception in all its natural ugliness and brutality, and he 
abhorred this thing he had done. 

The minutes passed. The stillness deepened. The shadows 
grew more oppressive. Into the tainted heaviness of the 
atmosphere there passed, or there seemed to pass, the breath 
of a vague expectation, a kind of subtle correspondence, as 
it were, to the listening face upon the pillow. The only per- 
sistent sound of which he was conscious, as the minutes passed 
and the silence thickened, was the murmur of the child in the 
nursery, and this was a sound that, under the working of a 
feverish and morbid lucidity, had the effect of deepening his 
pessimism. What is its chance ! What is its chance ! ” was 


VOYSEY 


333 


his inward cry. “ What is its chance with the inheritance be- 
fore it ! ” In the sound of the little fellow’s voice there was 
the implication of a terrible continuity, of a terrible beginning 
of things all over again, a terrible perpetuation of the eternal 
mistakes, the eternal delusions and misconceptions. He 
generalized the misery before him ; his murky horizon grew 
wider. And yet, after all, it was not the thought of the 
miseries of existence that made his desolation, but the thought 
of their deep necessity. It was the thought of the countless, 
countless multitude of lives to which their miseries alone give 
value. For it is by our sufferings, he believed, we redeem our 
lives, — and not from their grossness merely, but from their 
blindness, their purposelessness, their banalite. No gospel of 
happiness had ever touched him : he had found none that was 
quite free in the end from some fatal defect of futility. It is 
through suffering, he believed, through deception, through 
disappointment, through disease, through pain, alone that the 
average existence can attain to any depth of meaning, and in 
the absence of the faith or the fanaticism that can rise above 
or rejoice in this awful dispensation, the thought of it at once 
revolted him by its profound oppugnancy to his instincts, and 
moved him to an immeasurable pity. 

Ah, pity, pity, he at least had that, it was the great guiding 
star in his darkness ! — And still, even while the thought was 
in his mind, another thought leapt in beside it. What was it 
worth, this pity of his ? What had he made of it ? To 
what use had he put it? From what had it saved him? 
What was it worth beside the pity of the thousands who were 
working for mankind in a thousand ways of devotion ? Even 
now, in this terrible room — did it prevent his feeling keenly 
alive ? He frankly made the brutal acknowledgment to him- 
self that for all his pity and for all his pessimism he was glad 
it wasn’t he who was dying. He was glad to know he had 
another chance; that London was still there, and the world 


334 


VOYSEY 


still going on for him ; to know that one of those trains he 
heard going by would take him back to the lights and the 
streets. It is by our sufferings, no doubt, we redeem our lives, 
but had his sufferings as yet redeemed his ? Had he escaped 
from the folly and futility ? And then again in a little while, 
even these self-accusations appeared not to be final, and failed 
to satisfy him as he thought. He was too much aware of the 
merit of their sincerity : — how many of those who sacrifice 
themselves for others, sacrifice themselves to themselves ? Or, 
granted that there are many who do, still the last word is to 
be found no more in what a man does for others than in what 
he thinks or feels : rather it is to be found in the faith a man 
keeps with himself, the faith he keeps with his own soul. 
The supreme integrity to be preserved, after all, is the integ- 
rity of one’s knowledge of oneself. 

And then, once again, his thought revolted — revolted 
against the horrible egotism of these reasonings and question- 
ings, against his inability to give himself to the miseries of 
another, unreservedly, even for a single hour. He rose and 
went to the bed. Arthur moved his head upon the pillow 
and turned his face to the firelight, and Voysey read once more 
the strange vague anguish in his eyes. A blind impulse of 
pity and remorse swept through him, and he dropped on his 
knees by the bed. 

“ Ah, my poor dear fellow,” he cried, taking one of the 
sick man’s hands in his, “ would to God I could do something 
for you ! Would to God I could give you some relief! ” 


X 


The improvement in Arthur’s state, for which the doctor, 
who had shown no excess either of vigilance or judgment in 
his management of the case, had unwisely wished an opening 
to be left, did not occur to reward his deliberation. The 
apprehensions that should have stimulated precaution were 
justified ; peritonitis supervened : the next day the surgeon in 
Wimpole Street had to be telegraphed for, an immediate 
operation being imperative. 

It was a little past three o’clock in the afternoon when he 
drove up in his brougham and pair, and Emily, who had had 
Voysey with her all the morning, received the eminent surgeon 
in the drawing-room. He proved to be a spare, middle-aged 
man in a buttoned frock-coat, with that uncomfortable stiff- 
ness in his well-carried figure that often goes with great energy 
of temperament, and an abruptness and want of ease in his 
address, which he seemed to wish to pass off as professional 
incisiveness and impatience to get to the point. Emily felt it 
rested upon her to attempt a few explanations, but the occa- 
sion impressed her, and, to her relief, upon Voysey’s suggest- 
ing a small correction, Mr. Rurnside turned to him in a way 
that enabled him to continue the narrative. The dismal little 
interview, happily, lasted but a very few minutes j for the 
surgeon, whose concessions to the amenities were perfunctory, 
took prompt advantage of the entrance of the local practitioner, 
who had been busy up-stairs with the anaesthetist and the couple 
of nurses, to propose a withdrawal to their patient. 

Emily had risen when the doctor rose, and for a moment or 
two after the door had closed behind the two medical men, 
she remained standing in the middle of the room. She had 

335 


33<5 


VOYSEY 


turned her head to the window, before which the rather 
resplendent equipage from Wimpole Street was passing after 
a turn it had taken down the road. It said much for the splen- 
dour of its appointments that they managed to keep any effect 
of impressiveness at all, for it was not an occasion to do them 
justice, the day being unutterably dreary. The weather had 
changed in the night ; the frost had given in the early hours ; 
a sudden thaw had changed the aspect of the world, scatter- 
ing the lingering whiteness from the gardens and the Green, 
and giving back a withered grey-brown verdure to the grass, 
and a blackness to the dripping twigs. The air had the raw 
discomfort of a state between rain and mist, and instead of 
ringing sharp upon the road as they had rung for so many 
days, the wheels of the carriages that went by grated heavily 
through the slush of the loosened surface. The doctor’s 
coachman had turned up the collar of his white mackintosh 
against the weather, and the horses wore their loin-cloths. 
Upon Emily the impression the interview had made was still 
strong, the flush of the excitement still lingered in her cheek ; 
and it seemed as if, distressing as the impression might have 
been, she were clinging to it, because it afforded her a certain 
relief from other impressions under whose tyranny she dreaded 
to return. 

“ What do you think of him ? ” she asked. ‘‘ Shouldn’t 
you say he is very clever ? ” 

“ Certainly ; I should have confidence in him.” 

“ You have not met him before ? ” 

“ No, I was wrong ; I know him only by name.” 

“ He knew your father, I expect.” 

“ Oh, quite possibly.” 

“ It didn’t occur to you, I suppose, to tell him who you 
were ? ” 

“ There was nothing that seemed to lead up to it. It was 
not necessary, I think.” 


VOYSEY 


337 


Her head was still turned to the window. The brougham 
of their own doctor, which had been making little journeys up 
and down the road for some time, had paused by the railings 
of the Green. 

“ Did you notice his hands ? '' 

“ No,” Voysey admitted, “ I didn’t notice them.” 

“ I am rather surprised you didn’t.” 

“I noticed his manner — which was not altogether pre- 
possessing.” 

“ I wonder you didn’t notice his hands.” 

“Ah! Perhaps when he comes again. What was there 
about them ? ” 

The flush slightly deepened in her cheek. 

“ I don’t know. They were beautiful hands, really, I 
suppose. But somehow” — she suddenly turned with a kind 
of appeal to him so that he had a chance to see how deep the 
impression had gone, “ they made him seem so anxious to 
begin I ” 

She still, for a moment, remained standing where she was, 
and her face, from which now the colour was beginning to 
pass, had a vagueness that made the appeal seem in a sense 
impersonal. It was at least in this sense that Voysey read it, 
since he abstained from taking it up. And his reading was 
probably the right one, for when, in another moment, her 
expression became less vague, and a point of conscious per- 
sonal recognition dawned in it, she had the appearance sud- 
denly of coming to herself, of returning to the remembrance 
of a precaution that she had momentarily forgotten and let 
slip. 

She moved to the fire-place, and Voysey, as if to give her the 
assurance of his freedom from all intention to intrude, stepped 
away to one of the small tables, from which he lifted a book. 
Emily leaned upon the chimney-piece, while Voysey absently 
glanced at the title-page. At length she roused herself, and 
z 


338 


VOySEY 


went with a heavy weary step to the sofa, above which the 
palm still rose. Voysey put down the book. He lingered, 
however, by the table, turning the pages of another; till, as 
absently, he laid this down too and put it straight with the 
first, and returned to his place by the fire. 

“ I don’t hear them above us,” she said. 

“ I expect they have gone into the nursery.” 

“To hold a consultation ? ” 

“Well, Mr. Rurnside, I imagine, has to be told things 
about the case.” 

“ And to see that everything’s ready ? ” 

“Yes, no doubt: I expect there is a good deal to ar- 
range.” 

Though Emily could not see the road from where she was 
sitting, she turned again to the window. The brougham and 
pair had drawn up for a moment beside the brougham of the 
local practitioner, and the coachman of the first, a man with a 
shrewd, clean-cut, clean-shaven face, held the end of his whip 
against his white mackintosh as he leaned round to speak to 
the other. A little steam hung above the horses’ necks. 

The silence grew heavy. Emily had settled herself in the 
old way among the cushions in her corner of the sofa, but her 
attitude had this difference that it was the attitude now of a 
woman who needed rest. The flush had passed from her face ; 
the whiteness had returned to it, — in the daylight a dull, sallow 
whiteness, without charm, without beauty. There were ugly 
circles under her eyes, and there were lines about the sensitive 
corners of her mouth ; and the lower part of her face, in the 
loss of the brightness happiness and success had given to it, 
had grown at once heavier and weaker. That suggestion of 
triumph he had been accustomed to see there had turned to a 
suggestion of defeat. But what impressed Voysey most was a 
discovery of a resemblance, in the look of peculiar vagueness 
and detachment in her eyes, to that expression in Arthur’s that 


VOYSEY 


339 


haunted him ; it was almost as if she too had caught some- 
thing of a fine intimation, as if she too in the stillness of the 
hush and the pause that had fallen all about her had attained 
to a sense of, to a state of response and correspondence to, 
the approach of the things that come without observation. 

“ I hear them now,’’ she said. “ They have gone in to 
him.” 

“Yes, I hear them moving overhead.” 

“I suppose now it won’t be long ” 

“ Before they give him the anaesthetic ? I doubt whether 
they are quite ready yet. There is sure to be some little 
delay.” 

“ I wonder if they have got everything. You don’t think 
one ought to go and see ? ” 

“We had better not interfere. They said they would send 
one of the nurses down if there was anything they wanted.” 

“ When you were up there just now ? ” 

“Yes, before Mr. Rurnside came.” 

She turned to him once more with that look of appeal that 
was at once so curiously impersonal and yet so touchingly 
human. “ Did the nursery look very horrible ? ” she asked. 
“ Had they begun to lay the things out ? ” 

“Yes, they were beginning to get things ready.” 

“ The instruments and things ? ” 

“ The toilet-pails and basins and so on. I didn’t see the 
instruments.” 

“ You told Ellen about the lamps ? ” 

“ She has taken them up. They will soon want them. It 
will get dark very early to-day.” 

Her cheek slightly flushed again. 

“ It looked very horrible, didn’t it ? ” 

He made a gesture expressive of how horrible the room 
had looked. 

“ So empty and horrible ? ” 


340 


VOYSEY 


“ The room looked very ghastly,” he said. 

“ That dreadful bare deal table. He won’t see that, will 
he ? He will be unconscious when they carry him in ? ” 

‘‘ No, he will see nothing of it. Oh yes, the room looked 
very ghastly,” he repeated, letting the intensity of his aversion 
lessen his resistance to her morbid inclination for details ; 
“ with the carpet up and the bare boards and the long kitchen- 
table. They have got the table before the window cross- 
ways. One of the nurses was sprinkling a little sawdust 
about it on the boards. And there, just the same, with the 
derision of a sort of dreadful incongruity, were the child’s pic- 
tures on the walls : Bubbles^ and the green Cinderella with her 
broom, from the Christmas number of the Graphic,^' 

Emily closed her eyes. “ It is horrible,” she said. 

“ And what makes it more horrible is that it’s just what he 
has always dreaded ! ” 

“ Always dreaded ? ” 

‘‘ All his life ! He has been haunted by the dread of an 
operation all his life : didn’t you know ? ” 

“ No. Has he told you ? ” 

“ Ah, it is not one of the things one tells. It is one of the 
secret horrors one lives with. He has always had his health 
at the bottom of his thoughts as a perpetually recurrent anxi- 
ety. There has always been something or other, some kind 
of complaint, he has more or less dreaded. I don’t mean 
that he has thought of nothing else ; he has forgotten about 
it for hours together, even for days together it may be ; but 
the misgiving has perpetually come back to him, and he has 
never been able to face it. He has never felt sure of him- 
self : — except for a little while in the holidays, at the sea, 
when he has been exceptionally fit. That is really what has 
made the exhilaration of his holidays — the feeling so thor- 
oughly fit as absolutely to get rid of the dread.” 

Emily had changed her position on the sofa. She looked 


VOYSEY 


34 * 


at him wonderingly for a moment. “ I think it must have 
come back sometimes even then,” she said. 

“ Oh yes, at Morebay sometimes, it came back.” 

“ That’s how you knew ? ” 

“ It is not very difficult to divine these things : — if ever 
one has known anything of the kind oneself.” 

“ Still his spirits were good as a rule, don’t you think ? He 
was nervous when there was anything the matter with him, 
but he was pretty cheerful generally, wouldn’t you say ? 
Always, with you, wasn’t he ? ” 

“ Cheerfulness hasn’t very much to do with it. Dreary 
people don’t have this secret kind of dread : if they have a 
dread, they tell you.” 

Emily sank back again among the cushions. More than 
ever, she had the look of a woman who needed rest, of a 
woman unutterably tired. 

“ The things one never tells make nearly half one’s life,” 
she murmured. 

“ Ah,” he acquiesced, ‘‘ they make quite that, I fancy.” 

Several minutes passed. He remained standing by the fire, 
his head, like hers, turned to the window, from before which 
the doctors’ broughams had once more moved away : he 
noticed that there was a patch of snow at the end of the garden 
under the privet hedge by the palings. Then, suddenly, it 
came over him that he too was tired, and he drew a chair to 
the hearthrug. 

Yes, he was very tired, tired from the exertions of the 
morning which the arrangements for the operation had made 
heavy, tired from the exertions of every day of all the seven 
days of the illness, from the strain of his share in the perpetual 
vigilance and attention an illness makes it necessary to exert : 
he was so tired that it seemed for a moment as if he were 
conscious of nothing else in the world than the comfort of 
the physical sensation of rest. He lay back in -the chair, his 


VOYSEY 


342 

arms fell by his sides, he stared into the hollows of the fire. 
Then a curious thing befell him. This small act of physical 
surrender was accompanied, probably as a consequence of it, 
by a subtle mental change. It occurred to him, with the swift- 
ness of a sudden spontaneous shifting of his thought, that his 
true attitude towards the experience through which he was 
passing was one of profound indifference. It was not by any 
means that what was passing appeared unreal ; his sense of its 
reality was intense ; he was acutely conscious of where he was, 
of the room, and of how it was looking, of the effect of the 
light upon the different objects, upon the fans, the vases, the 
pictures, of the white, blank, miserable face of the woman 
who was sitting but a few feet from him. The reality of 
these things was intense : but he experienced a detachment 
from them, a loss of the sense of his committal to them, of 
the sense of their importance, of their power to make a perma- 
nent impression upon him and take a lasting place in his life. 
He effected a kind of subtle escape, as it were, a kind of 
subtle withdrawal : the reality, after all, was less real than his 
consciousness of it, and consciousness was a stream that bore 
one on and away past the incidents of any given moment or 
hour, as a river bore one past the changing features of its 
banks. It occurred to him that perhaps of the misery and 
horror through which he was passing what he would retain 
most vividly would be just this particular moment of strange 
escape and withdrawal — this moment in which he lay back, 
very tired, in his chair before the fire, and lost himself in the 
living hollows. 

Emily’s voice brought him back. At the sound of it, her 
unhappy face appeared among the glowing embers. 

“ I still hear them,” she said. 

His thought shifted again : the idea of escape passed into 
memory with an effect like that of a momentary hallucina- 
tion. But the room, when he drew himself up and looked 


VOYSEY 


343 


round at it, made the impression of an appreciable differ- 
ence. 

“ I believe it’s beginning to get dark,” he exclaimed, 
“ already.” 

“ It’s the mist. It’s getting thicker.” 

He listened. “Yes, I can hear them,” he said. 

At an interval from this the sounds for a moment increased, 
being evidently made by the exertions of two or three persons 
moving together: then — quite suddenly — the sounds ceased. 

“ They have carried him into the nursery,” Voysey said. 

After that the time began to pass obscurely, and the burden 
of the stillness, of the early-gathering gloom of the winter’s 
dark, of that mysterious pause that had fallen upon the house 
and filled it with an ever-listening dread and expectation, 
seemed to Emily and Voysey to grow heavier : it was as if in 
the office of their vigil a more solemn moment had come, a 
moment demanding a deeper prostration ; it was as if they 
were conscious of a deeper demand upon their attention, as 
if now to think of other things would be a cruelty, a negli- 
gence, an impiety ; with Voysey it became a point of honour 
to restrain his restless imaginings and not to register the 
impressions of the moment, as it had been once upon his 
approach to the Communion. It weighed upon them both 
that they must give him this hour, that they must give them- 
selves to him, that they must give him their thoughts, that 
they must be with him as much as they could. Where love 
had failed and friendship had failed, the wretched extremities 
of humanity enforced their tribute and their claim. And they 
who had robbed him of so much were constrained so far to 
atone as to give him this — their company in that dreadful 
hour. 

The dusk gathered ; the time grew vague ; the grey dingi- 
ness of the day was mellowing to a soft obscurity ; footsteps 
grew rare in the early quiet of the dismal nightfall, and the 


344 


VOYSEY 


doctors* broughams, as they passed and repassed with a 
miserable dragging slowness and monotony, made a harsh 
noisy grating with their wheels. And Emily and Voysey let 
the dusk gather about them, less conscious of the dimness 
into which the shadows of the room were deepening than of 
that lighted scene up-stairs with its bending concentrated 
faces. They remained absent and apart, and the shadows 
mounting behind them might have stood to the fancy for the 
symbol of a final estrangement ; their voices sounded very 
strange in the hush of their intense preoccupation ; yet in fact 
it was not a moment of estrangement but a moment of union, 
a moment in which they were together ; for they were 
together not merely in the sense of a debt to pay, nor in their 
response to that invisible approach that filled the shadows of 
the room as with a presence, but in their recognition of what 
life really means in its possibilities and mysteries and powers. 


XI 


The operation, as Voysey from the first had seen it was 
only too likely the case would be, was undertaken too late to 
be successful. Arthur died on the third day after it. And 
on the third day from his death they buried him. 

The days before the funeral proved for Voysey days of an 
unexpected release. For to the telegram that brought her the 
announcement of her son-in-law’s death, Mrs. Boulger, with 
whom Emily had had the foresight to abstain from making the 
worst of her husband’s state, responded by instantly taking the 
field. With the promptitude of a general hurrying to the seat 
of war she caught the first tolerable train that stopped at 
Heckingden, and they all saw at a glance, when she reached 
the villa, that hers was the readiness of the last button. Emily, 
who had no contention left in her, surrendered to the first kiss. 
She let Mrs. Boulger take it all over, and this, to do Mrs. 
Boulger justice, she very completely did. She took them all 
over, the living and the dead, making prominently of death 
an affair for the undertaker, addressing herself to the mournful 
preparations with the richest sense of opportunity. And there 
could have been no stronger proof of the satisfaction she found 
in what there was still left to do than the fact that she could 
forgive Emily for having gone through so much without her. 
A funeral, however, implies a death, and a death very often, 
if the circumstances are at all respectable, suggests a beginning 
rather than an end. Mrs. Boulger was troubled with a doubt 
as to her daughter’s future ; it was all very well to have the 
comfort of doing all this for her son-in-law now, — in his life- 
time she had been able to do much too little, — but what had 

345 


346 


VOYSEY 


he done for his widow ? There was perhaps a touch of mere 
superstition in her doubt : she had rather the traditional feeling 
against having one’s daughter and her child thrown upon one’s 
hands after so brief an experience of marriage than any actual 
shrinking from the campaign for which Emily’s return to 
Heckingden would be the signal : but at all events, however 
this might be, she fancied it was a great relief when Mr. 
Detmond of Hampstead, Arthur’s uncle, explained that their 
partnership had been devised on a basis so liberal (and indeed, 
he might have added, so much to his own credit), that Emily 
was left with a provision that was certainly sufficient, and 
might almost have been considered comfortable. 

But if Mrs. Boulger could forgive her own child for all she 
had done and suffered without her, Voysey divined, from the 
first glimpse he caught of Mrs. Boulger’s bonnet, that there 
would be no forgiveness for him. He was just the one thing 
she did not take over. Without at all suspecting how far 
matters had really gone (the servants liked her too little to be 
communicative), Mrs. Boulger was immediately aware of an 
irregularity in his presence ; he somehow contributed to the 
general impression the villa gave her of a place with imperfect 
resources for the proper building of the funeral pile ; he fitted 
in to the general scheme of her objections ; he suggested the 
wrong ideas like so much else in her daughter’s house, which 
had been, for instance, so far from suggesting — poor quaint 
little villa ! — that it was a house a man was likely to die in. 
In any case Mrs. Boulger made it clear to Voysey, who was a 
person with whom it was not necessary to dot the last i, that 
all that a man could do would be entrusted to the hands of 
Mr. Boulger, who, like some heavier portion of his wife’s kit, 
had come on by a later train. 

And so it came to pass that when, on the third or fourth day 
after the burial, Emily and Voysey, favoured by a lull in Mrs. 
Boulger’s vigilance (the importunities of some very old friends 


VOYSEY 


347 


had secured her), managed at last to obtain an undivided and 
unguarded hour, they met with the sense of a long separation, 
both of them, and a little like people who, in the interval, had 
travelled far. It added something to the strangeness of their 
meeting that the dining-room happened to be the place of it, 
for Mr. Boulger after finishing his after-luncheon cigar in that 
room (the fact that he had smoked it was still perceptible) had 
taken possession of the drawing-room, where sleep had sur- 
prised him on the sofa. It was perhaps a half-conscious 
recognition of the changed look which things wore that made 
Voysey pass the peg in the hall that had begun to be his, and 
bring his hat and stick into the room with him like any formal 
visitor. The day was soft and bright ; spring was in the air ; 
there had come a little genial burst of a fugitive and deceptive 
mildness ; and Voysey, with whom it was always a point to 
escape from wraps, had trusted to his frock-coat. The small 
strip of garden upon which the dining-room looked out had 
the shadow of the house lying upon it, and the air, when it lost 
the sun, very soon ceased to be genial ; but the window, which 
Mr. Boulger had been good enough to open, Emily found, 
with the warmth of the fire, could still be left ajar. 

The look of things had changed indeed since Mrs. Boulger’s 
terrible irruption. She had done much to dispel the mystery, 
to dispel the stillness and the pause. But after all that death 
had been there was a fact not even Mrs. Boulger could con- 
siderably diminish, and much of the strangeness Emily and 
Voysey now felt upon their coming together was due to their 
not yet having adjusted themselves to all that was implied in 
the idea of their own survival. From this general strangeness, 
however, there detached itself for Voysey, in the first moments 
of the meeting, an impression that had the force of a particular 
shock. It came from the discovery of Emily in her weeds. 
She had worn them at the funeral, of course, to which Mrs. 
Boulger had permitted him to be invited, but somehow they 


348 


VOYSEY 


had missed their effect ; he had passed them over as among 
the gloomy requirements of the occasion like his own black tie 
and gloves. To-day for the first time he saw them, they came 
home to him, he took them in ; and they gave him an impulse 
to preposterous mirth. It was too much, too much altogether ; 
it was too emphatic, too complete, this unhesitating acceptance 
of the new role, this complacent acquiescence in the obvious 
inferences : that a woman became a widow by the mere death 
of her husband was a revelation to him, and he admitted it 
took him unawares. He saw he must have had an idea that 
to be a widow meant so much more than this. He found 
himself wondering about a whole world of things that had been 
left out ; he wanted to know what had become of the past, 
what had become of himself! At the same time it was very 
soon clear that in spite of the suggestions of his humour, in 
spite, that is, of himself, he couldn’t deny he was really 
impressed ; the little lawn collar and the little lawn cuffs, that 
gleamed with a peculiar dull whiteness against the heavy black 
fall of the crape, the adoption of this social uniform of bereave- 
ment — they were things, he perceived, one had to respect, 
things that did make a difference — for example, they carried 
with them the sense of a loss of privacy. As he looked at the 
collar and the cuffs, it appeared somehow as if he and Emily 
were less by themselves. He felt just as one feels when one 
sees one’s younger brother, let us say, in his new black coat 
or his red one. He belongs to one still, but he belongs to one 
less, because he belongs to his cloth or his colours. 

At all events, as Voysey drew one of the dining-room chairs 
to the table, which it was his intention to use for his elbow — 
Emily, by the fire, with her back to the window, was sitting 
in the one easy chair of the room — he realized that what he 
wanted was that she should ease things off a little, show just 
one glimpse (if it might be done without too much levity) of 
the old Eve behind the widow. But no woman ever yet, 


VOYSEY 


349 


under any circumstances whatever, saw the humour of any- 
thing she had on, and the perception of the extent to which 
Emily had already made her mourning a part of herself gave 
him a queer sense of being indefinably at a disadvantage. 

“Well,’’ he asked, after offering her a little pause of which 
she discouraged him by making no use, “ how are things 
working out ? Are you beginning to see your way ? ” 

“We have settled nearly everything, I think.” 

“ And about your going — have you settled that too ? ” 

“ I am going down to Heckingden with mother. For a 
time, that is.” 

“ And the house ? ” 

“We have decided to put some one in it.” 

“ Ah, then the house is to be kept on, is it ? ” 

“Yes — I intend to come back. There are all the things, 

you see. And besides ” 

“ I think you are quite right. It is always wise to leave a 
door open. At Heckingden, for instance, you may find it 
a comfort by and by to feel you are provided with an alter- 
native.” 

It was an announcement, this touching the house, the bear- 
ing of which it was not difficult to seize, the doubt that had 
troubled Mrs. Boulger having more than once occurred to him 
too : and the fact that Emily had at least a provision seemed 
a point very much to the good, an income being a thing that 
tends to the lightening of pressure, to the making of solutions 
less urgent. 

“Then Arthur left things in pretty good order, I suppose?” 
he suggested. 

“ Yes, it’s all right.” 

“ Ah, what a blessing ! ” he exclaimed. “ What a relief! ” 
“ Mother has had a long talk with Uncle Edward.” 

He crossed his legs with a view to securing just a little more 
comfort. The chair was high for the table. Mentally, the 


350 


VOYSEY 


comfort he was conscious of was not inconsiderable, and it was 
that of an extension of time. He saw the situation with more 
future to it, as one might say, he felt it had a wider horizon. 
Then, presently, the mention of Uncle Edward had the effect 
of recalling that night of the dinner-party, the one occasion 
upon which he and Mr. Detmond of Hampstead had met ; 
and from a picture of the old gentleman’s comfortable figure, 
as he remembered having seen it across the flowers while he 
had struggled to entertain his daughter, it was not unnatural 
that he should pass to a vision of Arthur himself as he had sat 
that evening at the head of his table, enjoying the duties and 
dignities of a host. And the vision somehow arrested him. 
The tone of his own voice, the words he had used to Emily 
a minute or two before sounded in his ears again, and so 
sounded as to give him a pang of regret. 

There was a difference in the tone of his voice when he 
asked — 

“ And you yourself. Have you rested. Are you better 
now ? ” 

“Yes, I am better,” she said. 

“ But rather tired still? ” 

“Yes, still rather tired, I think.” 

“After an ordeal like that — Ah, but you fought well!” 
he added. 

“ One couldn’t do very much ” 

“ No, but at all events all that could be done, you may feel 
sure you did.” 

And that was true enough : no woman could have done 
more — no woman even if the love of a life of many years had 
been there to prompt and encourage her ministrations : and 
yet, under his recognition of this, under the perfect sincerity 
of the tribute he paid her, he knew there lay what amounted 
not so much to a doubt perhaps as to a perpetual question, a 
tendency to a perpetual wonder and surprise. Why precisely 


VOYSEY 


351 


had she done it ? That was what he didn’t understand, what 
he hadn’t understood all along, what she had been obliged to 
keep from him not only because there were so many, many 
things that her divided obligation made it very difficult to 
express, but also because under a certain pressure of emotion 
she naturally became inarticulate. It was easy to say it was 
remorse and just possible to say it was love, and this was so 
much the best and simplest and most human thing that could 
be said that in the long run it was pretty much what he did 
say ; but what made that interpretation difficult to rest in was 
just this — the knowledge that it was not what she herself said. 
To whatever extent her ministrations might have been a matter 
of conscience with her, he suspected they were still more a 
matter of instinct. Tenderness, as she knew it, even her in- 
exhaustible tenderness for himself, came in sudden bursts of 
impulse that were like strong gusts of passion, like the prompt- 
ings of hot desire j even her love of young children was of a 
passionate, impulsive, instinctive kind, a kind common to most 
women of her temperament, to most women, that is, in whom 
other passions are strong. It would always be her youngest 
child she would love best. What she had done for Arthur 
had shown a clear giving up of the present to him, but Voysey 
had detected no giving up of the past. Their bond held still. 
If she had put a certain distance between them, if there had 
been a moving away, if she had suspended her endearments 
and avoided his caresses, on the other hand her dependence 
upon his judgment had been unceasing, and unceasing her 
appeal to his love. The hanging back was but a temporary 
and decent concession to circumstances of an exigent delicacy ; 
his own feeling had been that beneath it lay a deeper reliance. 
At the same time it would come back and come back to him 
that he was by no means in possession of what was passing 
within her, that there was a great deal going on he could by 
no means understand. What had happened to her on the 


352 


VOYSEY 


night of Arthur’s return had been obscure to him, and there 
had been a deepening of the obscurity ever since. 

“Yes, it has been an ordeal,” she said. 

“ It is the supreme ordeal. Death, and the waiting for 
death, and the coming of death, and — and the getting rid of 
death ... it is an experience that shakes one.” 

“ Yes, it shakes one,” she said. 

“ There is nothing like it ! Death seems somehow the one 
thing that absolutely counts. The one thing one always comes 
back to as absolutely certain, absolutely true, the one thing 
that eternally matters. And yet, on the other hand, it’s just 
the most uncertain of all. There is nothing at all like it for 
mystery.” 

“ Yes, it is an experience that shakes one,” she said. “ And 
it is odd how little one foresees — any one, I suppose, ever 
foresees ” 

“ That such an experience will come ? ” 

“ No ; how they will feel about it when it does come.” 

He glanced at her. Was there at last to be a little lifting 
of the veil, a little piercing of the deep reserve ? 

“ It makes things look very different,” he said. “ Espe- 
cially it makes the past look different.” 

“ It makes everything look different. One feels as if 
nothing could ever look the same.” 

The words fell heavily on his ear. As he heard her say 
them, it occurred to him that something he had always missed, 
something he had always wanted, had come with this difference 
in so far as it was a difference effected in her. And yet, sud- 
denly, strangely, perversely, as their eyes met and he felt the 
mournfulness of the impression her dress, her face, her attitude, 
her words, her voice conveyed, he experienced a subtle regret ; 
a regret that, after all, she should have had this ordeal, that 
there should have come this difference, that there should be 
any abatement of the high joy of life in her which had really 


VOYSEY 


353 


been a possession so superb : a regret that produced a magnifi- 
cent falsification of the past, so that he found himself actually 
wanting the old days back again, wishing her what she had 
been in their halcyon days by the sea, or even in the dusky 
lurid days of their wanderings. It was a feeling that had 
passed almost before he had been fully possessed by it, but it 
was there long enough to quicken his present impulses and 
make them more tender, more responsive, by subtly blending 
them with the remembered and imagined possibilities of delight 
he now fancied he had only half used or had missed. Nothing 
with him had the same binding power as regret. 

“ But somehow things do come to look the same,” he said. 
“ It is not the great experiences that remain with us but the 
small ones : it is the small things that remain — and they are 
tyrannous.” 

She smiled. “ That was one of the first things we ever 
talked about — long ago. Do you remember? ” 

“ No, I don’t recall it, somehow.” 

“ Oh, long ago ! The first time I called in Harley Street. 
I remember so well ! We talked about the small things and 
the big things.” 

“We have had them both,” he said, we have had them 
all ! Love and death are the points between which they all 
lie. You and I have now covered the whole ground.” 

And that was not a phrase coined upon the impulse of the 
moment, it was the expression of the deepest feeling he had 
reached. And it was not the deepest feeling only, but the 
most constant : the feeling that had been with him all through 
the days of the illness, from the day after the night she had 
come to him and made good her desperate demand for recon- 
ciliation. In reality the power of that night was upon him 
still ; he had not got away from it ; he had not left it behind, 
he had come down but very little from the heights ; and not 
only had the exaltation of that night been kept up by all that 

2A 


354 


VOYSEY 


had befallen them since, but there was a strange appeal for 
him in the thought of this experience they had had together, 
of this battle they had fought with death. And, indeed, they 
were not things easy to forget — those vigils of the winter’s 
dusk, that haunting condemnation of the dying face, that dead 
white stillness of the muted world. And to have fought with 
death together, and to have known the extremities of love 
together — what closer ties can life forge for you than these ? 

‘‘ I suppose I must go away,” she was saying presently. 
“ They all say so. But I dread it. It is horrid to go back 
like this — among people one has known all one’s life.” 

“ Yes; even though it’s only for a time.” 

“Anyhow. You know what people are ? — I mean, in a 
place like Heckingden. The women ! The way they come 
about you and seem to close you in — it is like a wave going 
over you and drawing you under.” 

“Oh, dreadful, dreadful!” he exclaimed. “Still, I think 
you are wise to go away. You need a change. You need a 
rest. You are so mortally tired I ” 

“Tired!” she echoed. “Yes, mortally, mortally tired ! ” 
The note of revolt in her voice, that broke the weary dead- 
ness of the tones in which she had spoken hitherto, was almost 
like a note of derision. There was a fervour and suddenness 
in the outburst that startled him ; he didn’t see just what it 
meant. Evidently, it was the expression of something more 
than a desire for rest ; it expressed a desire to escape, to get 
away — but to escape, exactly — it occurred to him — from 
what ? A desire to get away — from how much ? And, for 
an instant, possible depths of feeling in her seemed to be 
illumined for him as by the leap of a lightning flash. But it 
was but the illumination of an instant : the real effect of her 
cry of revolt was to re-awaken his regret of a minute or two 
before, in which, too, the element of revolt was strong. 

“ Ah, you will rest,” he said. “ Rest and recover. And 


VOYSEY 


355 


to think,” he exclaimed, “ that when you come back it will be 
spring! Already — even to-day — there is a touch of spring 
in the air.” 

There was a higher note in his voice ; there was a certain 
inspiriting quality in the mere ring of the phrase ; and he 
waited to see whether she would perceive that this was his 
way of interpreting and responding to the meaning of the 
changed note in hers. But she made no answer, and he went 
on : — 

“Yes, spring is in the air. The world's going on. And 
the odd thing is, that the more one has to leave behind, the 
faster it seems to go ! The future has a way of taking one 
unawares. It is upon one before one has an idea of it. And 
it’s just possible, you know, that it’s wise, in a certain sense, 
not to let oneself be taken too much unawares. There are 
certain things one may foresee — that one has to foresee — as 
a measure of self-defence.” 

He waited again. He wanted some kind of recognition of 
his intention from her — some kind of response. He wanted 
to feel he was carrying her with him. He wanted to know 
that in approaching this question of the future, of the future 
for them, he had, so to speak, her permission to intrude. 

“ There are certain things we shall have to consider by and 
by,” he said, “ and it almost seems to me that it might per- 
haps be as well to say a word or two about them to-day. This 
may be my last chance of seeing you alone. There are cer- 
tain things which lately, of course, it has been quite impossi- 
ble to say, and which it is not possible to do more than touch 
upon even now. What has happened is still a great deal too 
near to us. But before you go, I should just like to say this : 
that when you come back ” — he paused : he looked for some 
sign from her — something to show that this way of interpret- 
ing the change of note was not too wide of the mark : “ that 
when you come back you will find ” — he faltered and broke 


356 


VOYSEY 


off. A movement she made checked him. The tears were 
welling to her eyes. There was a misery in her face that 
v/as a deeper discouragement even than her inability to 
respond. 

And yet, never, in all the phases, in all the vicissitudes, of 
their intercourse had he been more nearly hers. It was a 
moment that seemed to be the product, as it were, of the 
whole sum of their experiences : in which everything was 
giving him to her — the pity of the present and the passion of 
the past, the force of the ties that death as well as love had 
forged for them ; his regret, his revolt, his desire to go back, 
to get away, to begin again ; her weariness, her forlornness, 
her unhappiness, his sense of her union with and dependence 
upon himself. 

He felt the natural thing to do was to take her in his arms, 
to soothe, to caress, to kiss her : the discouragement of her 
failure to respond disappeared altogether before the simple 
evidence of the misery of her tears. But he couldn’t, some- 
thing daunted him : or, rather, it was everything that daunted 
him ! The room daunted him : its memories were too vivid ; 
there was too much of the dead man’s life in it, too much of 
one aspect of the past. Her dress daunted him ; it too seemed 
to be bringing back the dead, to be asserting his rights, almost 
to be suggesting his presence. He acknowledged it had been 
right of her to check him. Her instinct had been truer than 
his. 

So all he did say was — 

Then we must leave it — leave everything till you come 
back.” 

She looked up through her tears : the meaning of the look 
was not quite clear to him, but he believed it meant gratitude 
for his forbearance. He put out his hand, and she took it. 

In a moment or two, however, she drew her hand away ; 
— but her tears flowed on, flowed on. 


XII 


It was not until the end of April that Voysey, though it 
had been decided that Emily should remain at Heckingden 
with her mother till the autumn, at last made up his mind to 
go abroad. 

There was nothing, in those first few weeks, he wanted less 
than change. Of novelty of emotion he had had enough in 
all conscience, enough to last for his life ! What he found he 
wanted was no new things but the old ones, that the old ones 
should just go on ! London, of course, at first sight, for a 
young man who is not only in it but of it, who has many 
interests and many friends and leisure to give to them both, 
is not a place that suggests repose : but there is restfulness of 
a kind in almost any sort of continuity, even in a continuity 
of excitement; and what Voysey desired was not so much 
repose, in a literal sense, as continuance — to be able, mentally, 
to stay where he was. What he desired to avoid was the 
risk of that mental displacement, of that change in the point 
of view, which is apt to accompany any physical displacement. 
He passed those first few weeks in a passivity of numbness 
and blankness and exhaustion that gave to his acquiescence in 
his obligation to Emily as it had defined itself at last to his 
conscience, or at all events to his consciousness, the force of 
a final settlement. 

So that when, towards the end of April, he arranged with 
Miss Voysey for the shutting up of the house in Harley Street 
for the season — there had come to her, through a friend of 
the old days in Torquay, an opening for a May in Florence 
— what sent him forth upon his travels was less the quicken- 

357 


358 


VOYSEY 


ing of the social pace, to which he was without the energy to 
adapt himself, or the melancholy of the lengthening days, 
which were robbing him of the protection of his London dusk, 
than the discovery he made one night that his point of view 
had changed of itself, that the idea of things being settled had 
leaked from his mind as water leaks from the hand. 

Those months of travel proved indeed to be months of 
misery and exile. At one time and another he had travelled 
much, and there was no end to the things he liked in the life 
abroad — from the lighter touch, the lessened strain, the 
ampler leisure, to that simple foreignness of obvious things 
that never lets you forget you are abroad : such things as the 
blouse, the soutane, the shuttered window, the green-tubbed 
shrubs before the cafe, the clank of sabots in the cobble-paved 
street ; with the abiding comfort, in every scene, of the sense 
of your own non-committal to it. But this time the spell of 
the old charm was broken. He had lost his feeling for what 
he had thought of as the lighter touch ; on the contrary, it 
seemed to him now as if, ‘•‘abroad,” the burden of everything 
was heavier; the word misere recurred in his observations like 
the refrain of a melancholy tune — it recurred almost as if (as 
he sometimes had a humorous perception) he were an observer 
in a modern French novel ! In presence of the sabot and the 
blouse, it suggested the harder pressure of the social problem 
and the probable ruthlessness of every attempt at its solution ; 
and when it was called forth merely by a glimpse at the 
bourgeois existence, the discouragement of which came more 
nearly home to him, it was the result of a vision of those 
straitened resources of the domestic economy of which, in the 
tolle ciree of the salle-a-manger table, he saw a symbol for the 
discomfort and depression. 

He was out of spirits; he was out of tune; the light had 
gone in on the surface of things ; and if the joy of travel is 
not to pale, that light must be always there. He couldn’t get 


VOYSEY 


359 


back to his old sympathies, he couldn’t get back the old habits. 
He had never known so sincere a preference for his own 
people, so determined a conviction that, look where you please, 
things are not well with the Latin races. That point of 
inevitable divergence he had always found in his foreign friend- 
ships, even in the best and most intelligent of them, that point 
where the mutual understanding breaks down, he now reached 
with astonishing rapidity. The long continental afternoon 
weighed on him. His very non-committal turned to an inde- 
finable regret. There were moments when he was moved to 
an absurd envy of the people who met one another in the 
street; who had something definite to do, somewhere definite 
to go, who were committed, to whom the place they were in 
must mean so much more than any other : he would envy the 
habitue his cafe, the notary his etude^ the professor his school, 
the young workman his bare-headed work-girl to stroll within 
the unlovely suburb. And the evening was still more mel- 
ancholy ; the hotel evening was the worst of all. The 
hotel salon with its plush and its mirrors and its slippery 
floor, even when it was a popular hotel and in its season, had 
always seemed to him one of the least joyful incidents of 
travel : but now his dejection remained even amid the lighted 
gaiety of the hotel garden where the band played, and the 
little groups gathered at the tables on the pebbly walks, and 
the lamps flickered as the wind rustled through the leaves. 

It was a dejection that remained wherever he wandered or 
whatever he did, to which the brightest and pleasantest things, 
the sunlight and the crowd, seemed perhaps most to minister ; 
for it was due to the pressure of a question upon which, though 
in itself the most private and most personal, his thought worked 
and worked until he found the issues it involved confronting 
him everywhere, till everything seemed to lead back to it. It 
was the question, of course, of his obligation to Emily : what 
was he to do } (Ought he to marry her 1 


360 


VOYSEY 


Almost from the beginning one point, at least, was plain to 
him : that whatever he did, it would be wrong. It was the 
essence of his position that there was no right to it ; it was not 
a question of doing the right thing, it was only a question of 
doing the thing that should be least wrong. And it was just 
this that made the wretchedness of his perplexity, for the more 
his thought and imagination played round the alternatives of 
his choice, the more he saw that, upon whichever his decision 
might fall, the wrong of it would be immense. 

His first decision, in which he had rested as long as he 
could, to which he had clung even when the exaltation in 
which the experiences of the illness had left him had become 
a little forced, a little fictitious, was that the pledge he had 
given Emily the night she had come to him must be considered 
absolute and final. That he was able to rest in this decision 
as long as he did, that his exaltation was able to dominate the 
restless activity of his intelligence at all, was a proof how pro- 
foundly these experiences had moved him. He lived, in these 
first few weeks, in a world of abstraction, in a world of great 
terms, a world from which, keen usually as was his eye for 
them, the details of daily life had dropped out. He thought 
of his obligation to Emily in terms of the things that most 
mattered in life : when love dropped the parable, death took 
it up ; he thought of her not merely with a deeper tenderness 
of pity and regret, in which there was a constant dwelling upon 
the best there had been between them, upon her devotion, her 
love, her happiness, their good hours, the hours when they 
had forgiven and been reconciled and had forgot; but his 
thought was penetrated with the poignant remembrance of the 
ground they had covered together, of the depths they had 
sounded, the heights they had scaled, of all they had seen in 
their passionate experiences, of the illumination of those watch- 
ings in the winter’s dusk. It seemed to him possible to go no 
further ; life can forge for you no closer ties than these ; to 


VOYSEY 


361 


have entered another’s life in this tremendous way is to have 
made that other’s life yours. The value of life is just the 
value you give to experiences like these, and the moment you 
do cease to give them their full value, that moment, inevitably, 
however high your estimate may still seem to you to be, you 
have begun to cheapen life itself. 

It is a difficult level to sustain, and especially difficult if you 
have only a limited command of the lyrical, and a very marked 
gift of lucidity. It was inevitable that there should come to 
him a sudden drop, an importunate intrusion of reality. While 
he was still in London the question re-opened itself, and he 
saw that the idea of the obligation of any such pledge as his 
making a final solution was but a broken reed, that the real 
obligation for him was to render so honest an account of the 
past between himself and Emily that he might know how best 
to dispose of any sum of possible good still left to their credit 
in the future. 

It was one afternoon in Normandy, in a little out-of-the-way 
town to which he had wandered mainly because it was a little 
out-of-the-way town, and he had caught a certain flavour of 
romance in the idea of it, that he discovered that the last of 
his exaltation had faded away, and that the reality once more 
had made good its remorseless claim. The little town deceived 
him ; by luncheon time he had seen all that he cared to see ; 
so that, after luncheon, for which, at the rather dismal little 
inn at which he had put up, he had only the company of a 
French man of business, a stout vehement man who expressed 
himself with a marvellous precision of analysis, he found 
another of those interminable afternoons before him, of which 
the vacancy, in a very dull little town where you have exhausted 
the interest, may become unimaginably oppressive. As the inn 
had nothing better to offer than a salle-a-manger without even 
one reasonably comfortable chair in it, he turned into the hot, 
empty, offensive little street, and after retreating for half-an- 


362 


VOYSEY 


hour into a cabaret with white curtains to its windows and 
crossed billiard-cues painted in brown on each side of them, 
sauntered to some high ground near one of the churches, where, 
in an avenue of elm-trees, that had an air of apology that tended 
to soften the feelings the afternoon had engendered, it was his 
good fortune to secure a little shade, a breeze, a view, and a seat. 

From this accommodation he was presently driven by the 
exasperating monotony of some drill fifes and drums on the 
parade-ground of a neighbouring barracks, and, to escape them, 
he took refuge in the church. 

Except for an old sacristan in a blue apron and a small 
black skull cap, who was sprinkling sawdust upon the pave- 
ment among the carved stalls of the choir, the church was 
empty when he entered it. It was not a very remarkable 
church, and Voysey’s interest in churches was on the whole 
of that “ literary ” kind that can do without exceptional 
features ; what he asked chiefly of churches was that they 
should be cool and old and dim, should give him plenty of 
shadows and recesses, of columns and of coloured glass : and 
these demands — less the coloured glass — the church he was in 
seemed fairly to satisfy when, from a stray chair near the pul- 
pit, he had the nave stretching before him, dim, grey, sunless, 
its solemn pillars mounting in dull white lines monotonously to 
the groined vault. The west door was open, and on the flag- 
stones, beyond the last row of empty chairs, lay a square of 
brilliant sunlight. 

Gradually from, as it seemed at first, a state of thinking 
about nothing at all, from a placid and tired enjoyment of the 
cool and the quiet — the sound of the drill music came vague 
and faint through the open door — his thought began to work 
upon his problem with that pitiless clearness of perception that 
makes the terror of a wakeful night. The merciful falsification 
of memory lifted from the past as a mist lifts from a naturally 
unlovely scene. The life of those terrible months came back 


VOYSEY 


363 


just as he had really lived it : came back with a wonderful 
intense, crude distinctness of impression and detail — the hours, 
the places, his moods, her phrases and gestures came back ; 
the rooms at the villa, their lodgings at the sea, their wintry 
walk near the brick-fields, the lighted crowds of their wander- 
ings ; their silences, their estrangements, their recriminations, 
his reluctances ; the horrible bad faith that had put him from 
the first, all through, so irreparably in the wrong, the abysmal 
deception of their nights of love. It came back and came 
back, the life of those months, in scenes of extraordinary dis- 
tinctness, and from each scene, each incident, each impression, 
he experienced an acuteness of recoil that was like a physical 
drawing away. Each scene as it appeared fell with a peculiar 
vivid stab upon his nerves that was like a literal stab with a 
knife. The merciful falsification of memory had lifted, and 
for the moment he was incapable of any of that tenderness 
of recollection even the least fortunate human contacts leave 
behind. Gradually the past lost, as it were, its very atmos- 
phere, all the warmth and colour of illusion, and the broad 
facts of the story alone remained, standing out with an ugly 
crudeness of bald statement like those of some miserable story 
in a newspaper. 

He sat very still. Outside, through the open west door, he 
could see the angle of an old stone wall, its top covered with 
ivy, the green of the leaves so vivid in the sunshine that they 
almost seemed to dance with light. Upon this vividness of 
the sunshine and the leaves his eyes were fixed with a curious 
intensity of vision : it was as if the idea that possessed him 
were a material thing that was actually visible on the wall. 
The idea that possessed him was just this : that he was receiv- 
ing his desired illumination. With such a story as his there 
was only one thing to be done — and that was finally to close 
it. It was impossible to think of beginning again ; it was 
impossible that such a life as he had lately lived should be 


3^4 


VOYSEY 


carried on indefinitely into the future. The future ! — that 
was just where it was ! For Emily and himself there could 
be no future j they might throw in their lot together, but they 
could never have anything that could be called a future. They 
had tried the experiment, they had had their experience, and 
the evidence was all against them ; the past was eloquent in 
dissuasion ; it offered in its deceptions and discords and disgusts, 
in the disunion of their immense and ineradicable difference, a 
portentous dowry of discouragement. Essential differences, 
heat the furnace of passion as you please, are never in the 
world to be dissolved by it. And when, as his imagination 
recovered the details, he turned from the moral side of the 
prospect to the material, the impossibility loomed still larger. 
Where were they to live ? What were they to do ? The 
world, no doubt, is a very large place, but the spot in which 
any individual finds it thoroughly desirable to live is usually a 
very small corner. Of course he would have to give up his 
corner; the social impression Emily produced was not of a 
kind of which he could bear to witness the indefinite repeti- 
tion. At all events, it was not one that he could allow to be 
indefinitely repeated upon those who had the claims of Miss 
Voysey and Nell. The kind of life he and Emily would be 
able to organize was very hard to conceive, but such friends 
as they might ultimately gather about them would certainly 
have to be hers. And it did not make his conjectures per- 
ceptibly brighter that the instinct he had for her development 
prompted the conclusion that, one day, Emily would be sociable. 
Indeed, the more he recovered the details, the clearer the reality 
grew, the more such a marriage seemed to offer, in a positively 
startling array, all the elements for failure and disaster. It 
would be a step of almost colossal unwisdom. And it was 
just possible to think of it as almost as large a crime. The 
reluctance he had always had — a reluctance that came, no 
doubt, as much from the sufferings of his own childhood as 


VOYSEY 


365 


from the idealism of a morbid and ascetic reaction — a reluc- 
tance to incur a responsibility for other existences, had, by the 
disorders of his recent aberrations, been very sensibly deepened ; 
and he had only to recall the later phases of their relations, 
the days of their wanderings, Emily’s curiosity, her lessening 
reticence, the readier recurrence of allusion, to feel that for the 
children of such a union as theirs there would be a lowering 
of the chances to a point virtually criminal. 

And the illumination of that afternoon remained. He lived 
for many days in the light of it. The terms of the problem 
had changed ; he no longer stated it as a question of the best 
thing, it had become a question of the thing that was possible. 
To the prospect of such a marriage as that, with its inevitable 
burden of misery, a misery with which it would be altogether 
hopeless to contend, his whole being said NO. From Nor- 
mandy he wandered to Paris, and from Paris, where the tem- 
porary comfort of his solution put him in better tune for the 
world, to a chateau on the Aisne, to stay with some French 
people with whom he had long been intimate in London. 
After his visit, he satisfied an old curiosity by exploring some 
out-of-the-way regions towards the eastern frontier, and then, 
becoming once more on doubtful terms with himself, he wan- 
dered back to Paris again. 

But Paris this time, as he discovered on the night of his 
arrival, when he strolled out after dinner at his hotel, was not 
the place to do much for him. From the night aspect of the 
city, in his response to the charm and spirit of which there 
had usually been something of elation, he experienced this 
time a repulsion and a drawing away ; there were certain ideas 
of which it made him more aware by ministering to the con- 
viction round which they played. The truth was, of course, 
that, in the interval, the light had failed, the question had 
re-opened itself, he was walking in darkness again. And the 
darkness now was the more dreadful because the illumination 


366 


VOYSEY 


by which he had lately walked had made the nature of his road 
very plain to him. He had had a very clear vision of what it 
would mean to go back : to go back to the villa and begin 
again, to renew the connection, continue the story, resume his 
professions, surrender to the old exactions, the old provoca- 
tions, the old influences, to live again in that atmosphere so 
deeply tainted. The voice of the past, eloquent in dissuasion, 
proclaimed it was impossible to go back. And here, no doubt, 
he might have rested, had he not, in sudden variance with the 
first, heard another voice, that proclaimed it was almost equally 
impossible to go on. To go on without her, that is; to leave 
her behind; to cut her adrift; to put back snugly into port 
himself, and leave her at the mercy of the seas. Of such 
desertions he had always had a lively horror — they are the 
grossest form of betrayal. There is always about them the 
ignominy of flight, the egotism of the sauve qui pent. For 
even when such a union as theirs ends in no scandal of dis- 
covery, no obvious disaster, no visible triumph of a virtuous 
world, it still leaves a woman exposed — morally, physically 
exposed : leaves her with children of moral consequences a 
man should be man enough to father, moral needs he should 
help her to meet. /In passion between men and women the 
chances are never even, the play can never be made fair : a 
woman has too much against her : a man may put down 
but a counter or two, when a woman plays for her soul. 
For this reason the account between them is one that can 
never be closed, it is a page that can never be turned. 
No man can call himself generous who will give a woman a 
“ past ’’ and reject all her claim to his future. And between 
himself and Emily, more than in most such cases as theirs, 
the balance was horribly uneven : she had given him every- 
thing — her faith, her honour, her love, the courage of a tre- 
mendous risk : — and in return — what had he given her ? . . . 
Ahj clearly it was his turn to give, it was his turn to pay. Not 


VOYSEY 


367 


to honour such a claim was to put himself shamelessly on the 
list of the world’s defaulters — a world eternally dishonest to 
women. And for such evasions, to do him justice, he was a 
man without inclination : indeed he had missed, by not very 
much, being one of those for whom the necessity for atone- 
ment may fill life with a mission. At least it was because he 
divined in the aspect of Paris, as he saw it with the eye of his 
constant pre-occupation, so little intention of discouragement 
for defaulters that he had experienced the moving away. No ; 
as the days went by, the one impossibility waned, and the 
other grew larger, until the point upon which the light fell was 
just this, that if ever he was to get right with himself again 
he must put the matter right with herj he must honour her 
claim, he must take up the burden, he must go back to her, 
he must be straight and honest, and must pay. 

And then, just as this decision had been reached, there 
would come a change of mood, some subtle assertion, as it 
were, of the instinct of self-preservation, and a voice would 
whisper that this was but the decision of a mood, and that 
reason was not convinced. And the pitiless facts would once 
more rise up before him, the miseries of their disordered and 
dishonourable past, the dead waste of their unimaginable 
future. And he would see that there was no fair hope that 
payment of this kind would really satisfy his obligation, — he 
would see that the sacrifice would be immensely futile. 


XIII 


For a man with a difficulty of this sort, Paris, clearly, was 
not the place, and Voysey was forced to admit, as time went 
on, that it was not merely by its failure in discouragement for 
defaulters that Paris made its contribution to his discomfort, 
but that it contributed also, and not a little, by suggesting 
other points of view from which a position like his might be 
considered. A man, no doubt, whose relations with a woman 
are of this particular kind, can scarcely take those relations 
too seriously; but it is always possible that, by including him- 
self in his seriousness, he may carry it to the point of fatuity. 
And among the new positions he was being constantly obliged 
to take up, Voysey found few that brought him less perma- 
nent comfort than that in which he doubted whether in assum- 
ing the immense importance of his decision — its immense 
importance to Emily, that is — he were not paying himself a 
rather handsome compliment — whether, after all, it were not 
possible he was the least little bit of a fool. And returns of 
this kind — with others in which there was less of humility, 
it is to be feared, than of a frank and even genial impenitence 
— the pleasantness of Paris in summer, and the brightness of 
the society it was giving him (he knew a good many people in 
Paris) did seem eminently to promote. The worst of it was 
that these moods in which the sun of his humour struggled 
out for an hour or two were moods that were very soon over, 
and when the sun had gone in again, the sky darkened to its 
murkiest hue. 

No, Paris was not the place for him ; and it was with some- 
thing more than relief — it was with a sense of actual escape 

368 


VOYSEY 


369 


(escape, that is, from the danger of a breakdown that might 
be physical as well as mental) that he accepted the suggestion 
of a friend of his, who, himself a man for whom the hour of 
warning had struck, proposed that Voysey should join him in 
Switzerland. 

The escape was effectual, the relief was complete, the life 
and the friendship of the weeks that followed did an immense 
deal for him. They were weeks of healing, weeks of restora- 
tion, weeks of deliverance, weeks of a profounder change 
than any of which, at the depth he had reached, Voysey be- 
lieved his mental outlook to be capable. They were weeks 
of emancipation : of release from the misery of the eternal 
circle, from the tyranny of the fixed idea. He broke new 
ground ; he got outside his position, he got above it : he at- 
tained to a point from which he could look all around it (so, 
at least, he had the courage to hope), survey it, measure it, 
take it in. He passed to a state in which at last he seemed 
to be holding the balance of his obligation with something 
like a steady hand ; in which, at all events, he secured so 
much freedom as to see that his decision, to be the just as 
well as the wise one, need not necessarily be that which told 
most against himself. 

To see this was to see much : to see it, in fact, was noth- 
ing less than to hit upon the turning that led from the intri- 
cacies of the maze. For this clearing of his mental vision he 
was indebted to the life he had now to lead, the conditions of 
which, including as they did, the healing properties of a fine 
air, and the not less healing properties of talk that breaks well 
away from the personal circle, were of a kind to renew the 
judgment and restore it to health and a sense of proportion. 

The change that was effected went deep. There was per- 
haps no single phrase that could have covered the change, 
that possibly by which it would best have been expressed being 
this, that sacrifice, less than ever, appeared the one measure 


370 


VOYSEY 


of atonement. Sacrifice, on the contrary, he was inclined to 
think, was a word liable to be too soon said. And said 
especially soon, of course, just by those whose sense of the 
value of what we sacrifice, of the value of the opportunities 
we give up, opportunities, that is, for other experiences than 
those of sacrifice, is apt to be a restricted and imperfect sense. 
In any case it was clear that at the root of the idea of sacri- 
fice was nearly always the idea of gain. . . . And when 
sacrifice was gain — what more was to be said of it? The 
gospel of self-assertion, as Voysey, to whom attempts at the 
transvaluation of all values ” were of interest, had discovered, 
may be preached with a very crude fanaticism too, with a 
fanaticism as crude, at the very least, as that of some of the 
preachers of the other. Rather let every one seek his own 
good in his own way, ‘‘ devise his own virtue, his own cate- 
gorical imperative for himself,” was his feeling, to turn a 
phrase of Nietzsche’s a little against Nietzsche. Indeed his 
dissent from those who were fondest of the word went little 
further than this : than a desire to point out that sacrifice had 
no magic in it, that its results depended upon the temperament 
of the individual, depended upon his temperament and his 
circumstances ; while there was this further limit to his dis- 
sent that he admitted that even though sacrifice might not be 
gain, it might still, upon occasion, be imposed upon us as 
a sheer necessity of self-respect. ‘‘ ^elle que soit notre mis- 
sion sur cette terre^ quelle que soit le but de nos efforts et de nos 
esperances^ le resultat de nos douleurs et de nos joies^ nous sommes 
avant tout les depositaires aveugles de la vie. . . . On nous a 
donne la vie^ nous ne savons pourquoi^ mais il semble evident que 
ce n^est pas pour Paffaiblir ou pour la perdreJ^ 

The deliverance, however, these weeks had brought would 
have been of very questionable service to Voysey if it had 
done no more than enable him to open the battery of a tem- 
pered and reasonable egotism upon the claims of a defenceless 


VOYSEY 


37 


woman. Egotism is egotism still, however tempered and 
reasonable it may be, and his deliverance would have been 
very incomplete if it had failed to give him the mental freedom 
to perceive this, and do justice to the irony of his conclusions. 
The past, after all, was still there, and the eloquence of its 
voice, after all, was not always the eloquence of dissuasion. 
There is this too about the claims of a woman, that your 
rejection of them, however much you may have right on your 
side, puts you at a disadvantage by its contrast to the conceiv- 
able chivalry of your acceptance of them. ... It was not 
the blindness of egotism that had been given to him, it was 
simply the courage. It was as if he had taken the problem of 
his obligation out into the open air, and had let the winds 
play upon it, and had looked at it in the sun. It was the cour- 
age to let the process that was beginning go on, to let the 
chasm close, the wound heal, to let time and distance and the 
pause do their work, to let himself alone, as it were, quietly 
to take root again. For the year that was over, packed as it 
had been with experience, was but one among many years, 
and when all deductions had been made, every admission of 
futility and failure and folly, there had been experiences in 
those other years that claimed recognition too, experiences to 
make life precious. Life had been a gift for him also : a gift 
opportunity had made exceptionally rich : and if he had little 
enough to show in the way of definite achievement, of visible 
success, he ventured to believe there had still been something 
of purpose in his days, something of generous aspiration. 
Something worth saving from the wreck, something even of 
promise for a future. In any case, there were the opportu- 
nities themselves : not merely the obvious things that freedom 
and leisure and London and money could give, but the finer, 
more intimate, more delicate things — ^^the quickened conscious- 
ness and the shared curiosity, the harvest of a keen intelli- 
gence. Whatever life might be worth for him it was these 


3/2 


VOYSEY 


things that gave it its worth ; and the one point eminently 
clear was that they were things he could never give Emily 
nor share with her. i He might give her his money, his house, 
his name, his time: — he could never give her his life. He 
could never give her his life in its essential quality : the things 
of his opportunities, in her possession, would be no more 
than material advantages. And it is a poor thing to give one’s 
life if in the giving of it one spoils just the best it contains 
Moreover, life is to be taken as a whole ; it is not an affair of 
one claim, but of many claims — an affair of many claims, 
many experiences, many relations, and to see it only under the 
aspect of one claim is nearly always to distort it. To distort 
it, to cheapen it, immensely to narrow it : for the more boldly, 
largely, generously a life is lived, the more will innumerable 
claims press upon it. It may always be — for to this point he 
continually came back — that, upon occasion, the best we can 
do with the gift is, after all, to give it away ; it may always be 
that to save our life we must lose it ; but whatever the obliga- 
tion we recognize as supreme, it is to be remembered, it seemed 
to him, that it can never be the claim of our mistakes, our 
errors, our sins that makes the first claim or the best claim, 
and that the atonement that means the surrender of one’s life 
just to the worst thing one has done in it, is an atonement of 
a morbid and questionable inspiration. 

If this was egotism — and never for a moment did he miss 
the fine play of irony upon these conclusions of his — it was 
the egotism of sanity and of health. It was the egotism of the 
maturer experience, the deeper nature, the wider view; the 
egotism that has the courage to refuse the last word to 
the pieties of sentiment and emotion. . . . And again and 
again the pitiless facts would rise up before him, the certainty 
that the sacrifice would do nothing for her, that the atone- 
ment would be immensely futile. The certainty that Emily 
and he had given one another the best that they had to give. 


VOYSEY 


373 


and that to establish the connection would mean only the per- 
petuation of the misery. 

And so the weeks went on, and when by and by his friend’s 
leave of absence came to a close, Herbert made a southward 
journey into Italy, and joined Miss Voysey and Nell. They 
spent a little time together on Como and Maggiore, and a 
week or so at Vevey, having given some days to Geneva and 
Chambery and Les Charmettes, and then at last, in the begin- 
ning of October, ended with a return to London that was both 
rapid and direct. 

Miss Voysey, who had never been in Italy before, and had 
never been so long out of England, returned with a sense that 
the wonder of the world had been deepened for her, and with 
a substantial addition to her photographs. She returned with 
a rich store of memories, impressions, ideas — the spoils of 
galleries, churches, old quarters, lakes, vineyards, alps, of 
evening confidences in hotel salons, and of the conversations 
of their tables (Thbte ; a rich store that filled quiet moments of 
the autumn dusk for her, when Nell and she were in the 
drawing-room alone, with a peculiar and intimate gratitude 
that she should thus have been able to redeem the long loss of 
those unfruitful years at Torquay. Nell returned in some- 
thing of the same case : only much stronger upon Nell when 
the middle days of October came, much stronger than the won- 
der of any memories the last few months had given her, was 
the wonder of finding herself here in Harley Street, here in 
London, instead of in her Cambridge college. The wonder 
of having to admit that they really were all over at last, those 
intense and beautiful years. Abroad, the truth that she had 
indeed come down for good had never quite come home to 
her : the feeling of those holiday weeks had been that of an- 
other Long Vacation, the burden of the Tripos (she had done 
very well in it) having not yet lifted from her mind. In her 
acceptance of the truth now there was a regret that was some- 


374 


VOYSEY 


times so poignant as almost to move her to tears — just in these 
moments perhaps w^ith Miss Voysey in the dusk, when the 
scenes she had left would rise up before her with the charm of 
their October look : the misty Backs with the changing colour 
of the leaves, the dusky quads where the lights would be com- 
ing out when the men came up from the river, the gathering 
of the students for Hall, — with the full evening to follow, 
the half-hour’s excitement of some improving society, the 
still hours in the little room with its pretty pink-shaded elec- 
tric lamp and the photographs of Old Masters on the walls. 
It was a regret made deeper by a misgiving as to what the new 
way of life held in store, a consciousness that she had not yet 
made terms with it, didn’t really in the least know what it 
would mean for her. She saw an assertion of permanence in 
familiar things, an assertion of something very like a claim 
to possess her, that made her feel in these first days, when the 
process of adjustment had scarcely begun, like a prisoner who 
had surrendered to her bail. She didn’t know what London 
would mean, how her relations with people, the endless people 
who came to their house, and to whose houses she would now 
be expected to go, would be affected by the loss of that element 
of the provisional which had always — she saw now to what 
extent ! — provided a refuge and security : she wasn’t sure 
what it would be like to have permanently to take her place, 
how far it was likely she possessed the desirable gift for fit- 
ting in. 

And with her still more than concern for such matters of 
her own as these, was a deepening trouble for her brother. 
There was nothing about him of the dejected ’haviour of the 
visage; he was as ready, as light, as responsive, as full of 
interest, as eager for talk, as quick to take advantage of any 
failure of humour on her part — or his own — as ever she 
had known him to be : but she discovered that the months of 
his absence had been months of misery, and divined that, in a 


VOYSEY 


375 


fine sense, he had not yet come back. She detected a differ- 
ence that gave her a feeling that in spirit he was absent still ; 
she divined a weary and distant pre-occupation lying behind 
the brightness of his manner. And she did not find it diffi- 
cult, after the revelations of that night of Emily’s visit, to 
imagine the direction of his travels. 

That outpouring had not been repeated ; he was still 
haunted by the remembrance of the way he had let himself 
go that night, and the matter had never again, with any 
directness, been suffered to come up between them. But it 
was not at all the less certain that the matter was there, and 
it was just the charm, as it was certainly the strangeness, of 
their intimacy that, consciously to them both, a thing of this 
sort could be there. Nell had learnt that Emily was a widow, 
and though it would not have been an unnatural conjecture 
to connect her brother’s state with an obvious contingency of 
Emily’s marrying again, Nell gave it in fact a broader inter- 
pretation, and took it as an effect of the miserable infatuation 
as a whole. That a thing of this sort could be there, and in 
such a way as to tend by their consciousness of it, and with- 
out any direct allusion, to the deepening of their intimacy, gave 
that intimacy a feature of singular strangeness ; it was strange, 
abundantly strange — and nothing was stranger than that while, 
happily, she understood so little, she yet understood so much ; 
that with a nice-mindedness that was ignorant and incurious 
as to the facts, and quite ready to be shocked by the little she 
might discover of them, she had, at the same time, in a pe- 
culiar sense, a mind prepared for discoveries. And if he was 
still near enough in sympathy to other days to be aware that 
it was possible to regret that she should understand anything 
at all, unquestionably for himself, from the point of view of a 
genuine companionship, her very limited enlightenment was a 
gain ; for the feeling he had about her was that life was not 
mapped out for her, young as she still might be, into hard 


376 


VOYSEY 


little squares of black and white, of final and inflexible dis- 
tinctions, but was rather like a large flowing pattern with a 
beauty of fine gradations and blending lines, whose full design 
it was not very urgent, if indeed it had been possible, to 
seize. 

“ Have the others got as far as you, Nell, do you think ? ’’ 
he said to her one day. “ Is there as much they have left 
behind ? ” 

“ Got as far ? ” 

“ Well, up the hillside, if you like ! To the fine wide open 
point of view ! ” 

“ Oh, that. I haven’t got very far. Not half so far as 
you think.” 

“Ah, some way, Nell. We couldn’t have the talks we do 
if you hadn’t got a long way above the beaten track.” 

“ I am still miles below you.” 

“ Below me ? I should hope so ! I’m right up at the 
very tip-top, at the very summit of all ! But then — think 
of my wonderful head ! ” 

“ I know, Bertie. I do think of it. It is wonderful. 
There’s no end to my admiration of it. — But we do have 
some rather good talks, don’t we ? ” she added. 

“ I should think we did ! We get tremendously on the 
spot.” 

The girl laughed. “ I do love them,” she said. 

It was in the study that they happened to be talking. 
Stimulated by the discomfort, during her recent travels, of her 
unacquaintance with the language of the country, Nell was 
now embarking on a course of Italian, and Voysey, for good- 
fellowship sake, was helping her to steer out of port. In 
return for his services Nell had just given him his tea, which 
upon the theory that their labours were too serious to be inter- 
rupted by their removing to the draWing-room, Nelson had 
brought to the study. They were labours, however, over 


VOYSEY 


377 


which the seductions of tea and the twilight* had, very natu- 
rally, prevailed. 

‘‘ I have not got half so far as you think,” Nell told him 
again. ‘‘ JV ? haven^t. The theories you weave about us are 
ever so much too ingenious.” 

“ We haven’t, perhaps. But you, Nell ” 

“ I was just like the rest up there.” 

“Never, Nell: never in the world.” 

“ Oh, but I was.” 

“ A typical student ? ” 

“ Perfectly typical ! ” 

“ With a sense of obligation, ‘ as of piled mountains,’ upon 
you, tempered by a passion for hockey ? ” 

“You ridiculous old creature, Bertie. Yes — certainly I 
had the passion for hockey.” 

“ But the mountains, Nell ? ” 

“ Oh, miles and miles of them, Bertie.” 

“ No, Nell, the mountains are crumbling away. Ours are. 
And you are just one of us.” 

Nell finished her second cup of tea. Voysey flicked the 
ash of a cigarette into the fire-place. 

“ They are crumbling away,” he repeated, “ crumbling 
away. And it is not exactly faith that is removing them.” 

Nell, who was sitting near Dr. Voysey ’s writing-table, placed 
her cup upon the tray and brushed the crumbs from her lap. 

“ I am not sure that it’s not just that that is at the bottom 
of it all,” she demurred. 

“ At the bottom of what ? ” 

“ Of the changes that are now going on.” 

“ In our point of view ” 

“ In our way of feeling about nearly everything.” 

“ At the bottom of the change is faith ? ” 

“ Yes, I have an idea.” 

“ But faith in what ? ” 


378 


VOYSEY 


“ Oh, I don’t know. I can’t put it just into two words. 
It’s much too fearfully difficult.” 

“Oh, fearfully,” he laughed. “I fancy I can make a 
guess at your idea, though. Perhaps, right at the end of all, 
it is faith in ourselves ? It is faith in ourselves that has helped 
us to emerge, you mean, from under the mountainous sense of 
obligation ? ” 

“ Something like that. We trust ourselves more.” 

“ Don’t need to take our orders so much from outside ? 
Believe more our intentions are right just because — for that 
is pretty much what it comes to — because they are ours ? ” 

“ Believe, I suppose, there are so many more ways of being 
right.” 

Her brother’s laughter rang out. “ You are one of us, Nell. 
The mark is visibly upon you.” 

“ Only,” the girl hastened to add, “ I am not so sure you 
have emerged — very far, I mean.” 

“ I, Nell ? ” 

“ Yes, Bertie, you.” 

“ But I fancied it was precisely I ” 

“Ah, no, Bertie. I know you. To listen to you — yes, 
you have got ever so far ! But you do take things most fear- 
fully hard.” 

“That’s an old idea of yours, Nell.” 

“ I dare say it is, — it’s a good one.” 

He let the words rest upon the air. In the girl’s tone there 
was the betrayal of a certain intention, and he was inclined for 
once to take the comfort of accepting what he knew very well 
she was wishing to offer, as least so far as to present no active 
resistance. He threw the end of his cigarette into the ashes. 
He rose from his chair, and leaned for a moment upon the 
chimney-piece, under the sinister portrait of the Italian. Then 
he wandered aimlessly to the bookshelves, where the large gilt 
lettering of the titles still shone in the light from the window 


VOYSEY 


379 


opposite, that made a high space of dim whiteness among the 
shadows gathering in the room. 

“ I will tell you one thing,” he said, “ we have got away 
from and beyond, ‘ one way of being wrong ’ we have lost 
quite definitely — the capacity for superb follies. We’re in- 
capable — we I mean — of ever giving ourselves away. We 
are incapable of doing what one may call the superbly foolish 
thing : the thing superbly foolish and superbly fine : the 
sort of thing that won’t bear looking into for a moment, and 
yet is just the one thing that would put us absolutely right 
with ourselves. We respect it, we admire it, we enjoy it, we 
do it the very handsomest justice, we have the most beautiful 
feeling about it ; by sympathy and in imagination we do it a 
thousand times ; but if ever it comes to the point with us 
actually to try to do it ourselves, ah no, we find it impossible. 
We are too lucid, too clever, too analytical, we are altogether 
much too ingenious. And yet,” he went on, “ it comes home 
to one that what our incapacity really means is our missing, 
in the long run, what would be our very finest chance of all. 
One feels if one could do it, there would be nothing like 
it ! — for nine-tenths of the finest things that are done, the 
heroisms, the sacrifices, the great leaps into the abysses of all 
kinds, are follies — follies for us — follies when you come to 
look into them. And yet is there anything finer in life than 
these follies, anything more completely worth doing ? It is 
true, no doubt, that most of them do no good : when they are 
over, there is nothing to show for them : but how often is any 
real good — real, lasting absolute good — ever done by any one, 
anyhow ? For ourselves, at all events, I believe, if we could 
do them, we should find they were the very best there is for 
us to do, as certainly it is impossible to reject the opportunity 
of doing them, when it comes to us, without having an 
intolerable sense of a chance thrown away.” 

His words, too, remained upon the air. Nell was not ready 


380 


VOYSEY 


immediately to deal with them. The shadows that had deepened 
in the room were gathering about her where she sat, and 
though, as she leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, a 
little of the glow of the firelight touched her eager young face 
with that fine look of strength and of promise in it, her response, 
in the dimness, was not to be divined from her face. Voysey, 
in truth, scarcely looked for it; it was more for himself he 
had spoken than for Nell ; it was less of her presence he was 
aware, of to-day’s gradual deepening of the twilight, than of 
other presences, other scenes, other intimacies, other dim 
occasions of the nightfall. He was certainly still watching in 
the dusk — but it was the winter’s dusk, — before the dead white 
stillness of the muted world — with that listening face upon the 
pillow. Or, in the dusky room down-stairs, before whose 
window the broughams were passing, he and Emily were 
performing again the solemn office of their vigil, while in that 
lighted room above were the bending concentrated faces. 
They were together in any case in scene after scene of their 
experiences, in the stillness that had fallen upon the house 
with the sense of a great pause, the hush of an intense pre- 
occupation. He was with her again in those hours in which 
at last the silence had not meant estrangement, and now, in 
this room, upon whose air the burden of memories was so 
heavy too, the feeling once more came back to him that to 
have entered another’s life in this tremendous way could mean 
nothing less than to have made that other’s life yours. 

“ No, Bertie, no,” she said to him at length, and the sound 
of her voice almost startled him, so nearly had he forgotten 
her ; “ no, you don’t carry me with you. I don’t believe any 
one has really missed the chance who can have a feeling about 
it like yours. What I believe is that it is this, you know, just 
this, that is the chance — to see things, to think and to feel, as 
you say. I believe nothing you could ‘ do ’ would be finer : 
more dramatic it might be, more sensational ; but not, if you 


VOYSEY 


38 


did look into it, finer. For what we are^ surely, is the finest 
of all, and what we are depends not only upon what we do, 
but upon what we know, what we learn, — I don’t know how 
to put it, — upon the whole use we make of the things that 
happen to us, the whole way they move us, teach us, deepen 
us, — bring the meanings of life more home to us. And that 
deepening, doesn’t it, demands more, counts for more, proves 
more, than any number of your superb follies. Beside it in- 
deed, I have an idea, the superb follies may even look a trifle 
cheap.” 

He turned from the bookcase, where only the large lettering 
of the volumes on the lower shelves was now legible in the 
dimness, and coming back to the fire, rested his elbow again 
upon the chimney-piece. The glow of the flames, in the dim- 
ness that was deepening in the room, seemed to draw out the 
girl’s face from the background of shadow behind it; — at all 
events, as he looked down at her, he saw that the nature of her 
response was not to be mistaken now. And that response in 
which there was at once the finest quality of comprehension 
and of love, of a faith that will for ever appeal from what we 
do to a final and immovable conviction as to what we are, 
came as a wonderful fulfilment of the years of friendship there 
had been between them, a rare promise of friendship for the 
years to come. . . . Friendship for the years to come — he 
found himself dwelling upon the thought of it with a strange 
sense of restfulness and security. He kept his place ; the 
silence lengthened ; the girl’s eager, lighted, upturned face, 
with its wonderful look of tenderness and comprehension, 
spoke with a deeper and deeper meaning in its language. It 
was a rare moment of union, one of the moments from which 
there is no going back, a moment of the union and marriage 
of spirits ; and the metaphor perhaps touched him the more 
nearly from the conviction that never, so far at least as he himself 
was concerned, would there be any experience of the reality. 


38 ^ 


VOYSEY 


He yielded to an impulse of tenderness ; he stepped to the 
girl’s side and kissed her. 

He went back to his place. 

“ I am afraid your reasoning is a little loose, Nell,” he said, 
taking up the burden of her contention. ‘‘ It looks a little 
like a plea for a refinement of egotism. Still if the deepening 
were there. . . . But moods change : moods change, impres- 
sions fade, regrets pass . . . and, in any case, to claim it for 
oneself — what fatuity ! ” 

“ It is there, it is real, and it will last,” Nell insisted, “ when 
one has really suffered.” 

He lifted his head from his hand ; he moved a little from 
the chimney-piece, and, unconsciously, through the dimness, 
looked up at the portrait of the Italian. 

“ Ah, as for the suffering . . .” he admitted. 

“ Yes, that’s it,” she said. ‘‘ As for that is just simply as 
for the whole of it ! It is that that is the chance, you know.” 

He remained where he was : — and above him in the dim- 
ness, those eyes looked down with that irony in which there 
was so firm a rejection of all such conflicts as these, so fine a 
reference to those days when, though in a sense different from 
that in which these two would have said it, the world had in- 
deed very effectually “ emerged.” 


XIV 


It was not until the end of October that Emily returned 
from Heckingden, and it was not, for one reason and another, 
until some days after her return that Voysey paid his visit to 
the villa. 

To cover the whole ground ” is not often a very easy 
thing : even when your position is fairly simple, the attempt to 
turn it completely over, to take it completely in, to see it in all 
possible lights, may seriously try your imagination. And you 
may be pretty sure, when the problem has difficulties to make 
the ground you cover at all wide, that there will be at least 
one little corner you will manage to leave unexplored. Voysey’s 
consideration of his problem, whatever else might be said of it, 
could scarcely have been called superficial ; and still from the 
day he received a letter from Emily to tell him that she had 
come back, he was troubled with an acute misgiving. He 
discovered that there was one little corner he had indeed over- 
looked, and that a little corner that might provide him when 
the time came, with something like a rather tight place. It 
was a misgiving that became more acute as the days went by, 
and of which the edge grew to a very fine point of discomfort 
when, on the afternoon appointed for his visit, he found him- 
self, with the front-door closed behind him, on the pavement 
of Harley Street, definitely setting out for the interview. The 
November afternoon was mild and bright ; London had left 
the days of its dishevelled emptiness well behind, and had 
begun to look alive and warm ; the street, with its misty 
distance gilded by the sun, had an air of movement and life 
beyond that given to it by the afternoon traffic of the doctors’ 

383 


384 


VOYSEY 


broughams. Voysey’s step was slow; he missed his turning, 
and deliberately took the longer way ; and, as he passed the 
familiar names upon the doors, he discovered himself in the 
act of reviving old impressions, impressions of the far-off days 
when those ominous brass plates had weighed so heavily upon 
a certain small imagination, and was quite aware that his doing 
so was due to the pressure of his discomfort, to a simple in- 
stinct of postponement. In the Underground the discomfort 
triumphed ; in the gas-lit dimness of his compartment, in which 
he was the only traveller, he admittedly gave himself up ; for 
in the dimness that little corner of the problem he had so 
curiously overlooked was illuminated with the brightness of 
noonday. The little corner being, of course, the interview 
with Emily towards which the train was carrying him. 

However difficult a man may sometimes find it to give a 
woman to understand that it is his desire to marry her, he will 
certainly find that to give her to understand that it is not^ is a 
task of much greater delicacy. Voysey had gone far afield; 
he had let his eye wander over a wide horizon of considerations 
during the past few months ; but it weighed upon him with a 
dreadful oppression, as station followed station till at Bishop’s 
Road the train came out into the light of day, that the point 
most important to consider, the thing, so to speak, just under 
his nose, — the question as to what he would say to Emily the 
next time they met, had been passed ever so much too lightly 
by. It was the question of questions beyond all doubt, and 
dreadful was his sense of defencelessness and exposure as he 
admitted how insufficiently he was provided with an answer to 
it. The efforts he had made during the past few months, his 
desperate attempts at a solution, came back with an effect of 
mockery ! It was borne in upon his view, as he studied the 
row of coloured photographs above the cushioned seat oppo- 
site, the lines of backs of houses between which the train was 
passing not being inviting to the eye, it was borne in upon him 


VOYSEY 


385 


that to have gone so far afield really meant to have gone just 
so much astray, to have too much imagination being as bad as 
to have no imagination at all. He had been dealing with a 
problem, a situation, and it now stood out before him with 
terrible clearness that he was about to deal with a woman. 
And the difference was quite incalculable. 

The mild brightness of the autumn sun, which was becom- 
ing a little hazy as the afternoon wore away, was resting 
pleasantly, he discovered, on the villas with their red roofs and 
white-framed windows, as he followed the asphalt path across 
the Green. The trees on the slope of the embankment, in the 
gardens of the houses beyond the roadway, in the roadv/ay 
itself, looked a little ragged and forlorn with the dwindling 
burden of their perishing leaves : dead leaves indeed were 
everywhere — about the railings of the Green, on the pave- 
ment, on the asphalt path, blown there to some distance from 
the trees : he noticed too that the villas, as he drew near them, 
gained a certain forlornness of aspect from the drooping 
raggedness of their creepers, it being only in patches that the 
crimson still glowed against the warm background of the 
brickwork. His general impression, however, was not so much 
one of melancholy as one of surprise, for the touch of the 
hazy sun had an effect that was genial and cheering ; it was 
just that he had not expected that the season would make so 
much difference ; that in town one forgets about autumn 
leaves. 

From these observations, however, he was diverted with 
some abruptness when, having crossed the road and reached the 
wooden palings of the villa, he saw emerge from the porch a 
man whose figure instantly stirred remembrance though not at 
once to the point of recognition. The man came on down 
the red-tiled path, and Voysey, having passed through the gate, 
waited to hold it back for him. Before he reached it Voysey 
saw that remembrance stirred in him too ; his approach for 


386 


VOYSEY 


the last few paces slackened j at the gate itself, there was full 
recognition and a greeting. 

‘‘ Mr. Voysey, I think ? ” 

« Mr. Holmes ? ” 

Mr. Holmes, whom Voysey had not met since the night of 
Emily’s dinner-party, though he had sometimes heard of his 
visits to the house, greeted him with a friendliness that served 
to bring the memory of that evening back, and to revive an 
agreeable impression that Mr. Holmes and he had hit it off. 
Beyond this, however, memory declined to take him, while the 
friendliness of Mr. Holmes, pleasant as it was, provided no 
very easy points for conversation. The little meeting soon 
began to drag; and Voysey was the less disposed to prolong it 
as Mr. Holmes’s manner, in spite of its pleasantness, suggested 
that he was not very anxious to be detained. 

“ We shall meet again,” Mr. Holmes assured him cheerily, 
as he moved away. “I am an old friend of the family !” 

“ Ah,” Voysey laughed, “ I can’t quite say that. But if 
I’m not an old friend, I have been tried ! ” 

He passed on to the house. He stepped into the porch, and 
pressed the electric button : — to his surprise, the whirring of 
the bell was answered by the barking of a dog. The barking 
was kept up till the servant — Mr. Holmes had let himself out 
— arrived in response to his summons. 

Though he knew Emily’s decision to shut the house up and 
‘‘ put some one in ” had meant the dismissal of her housemaid, 
for the sight of the woman who opened the door he found he 
was quite unprepared : — he had had a feeling that, after all, 
it would somehow be Ellen he would see. The new servant 
was of a different type : she was older, less decorative, more 
mature, the depositary of other traditions ; instead of the smile 
of recognition with which he had found it pleasant to be 
received by Ellen, he met from this person with an unrespon- 
siveness that almost amounted to a challenge. She took his 


VOYSEY 387 

inquiry for Mrs. Detmond as a sentinel may take the counter- 
sign. He was conscious of an instant antipathy to her. 

She showed him into the drawing-room, asked his name, 
promised the early appearance of her mistress, invited him to 
a seat, and intervened to save him from the dog, to whom a 
visitor stood as an opportunity for an infinite succession of 
jumpings up. If the woman’s manner was unprepossessing, 
her attentions, he admitted, were acceptable. With no very 
tender hand she secured the terrier, and firmly removed him 
from the room. 

These small events did not last long, and in their progress 
Voysey’s attention was absorbed : it was not until the door 
was closed, and he was putting his gloves quietly in his pocket, 
that he began to take things in. Then, instantly, he received 
what was nothing less than a painful shock. It was now 
some eight or nine months since he had been in the room, and 
after an interval like that even a room that has changed very 
little, or has not changed at all, may give you a curiously 
unexpected impression. You change, if the room does not: 
— and this was an effect for which Voysey had allowed. But, 
clearly, it was the room that had changed — there could be no 
doubt about that ; though for a minute or two it was a change 
a little difficult to realize. The features, he saw, were the 
same — the paper, the furniture, the carpet : the shock came 
from a difference of expression. The look he knew, re- 
membered, had expected to find, was gone from the face of 
things. He felt he was received like a stranger. And yet, 
strong as this impression was, or rather perhaps because it 
was so strong, it took him a moment or two to work it out. 
At length what had happened grew clear : it was really simple 
enough : the things had been moved about, the room, so to 
put it, had been differently “ done.” Some of the small things, 
the vases and photographs and fans and so on, were not where 
they used to be j there were different curtains at the window 


388 


VOYSEY 


— draperies, he believed, if he could trust his judgment, of a 
much more conventional design; the piano had gone from its 
place, and — but at this point surprise fairly took the colour 
of dismay — the sofa was gone altogether, and the palm! 
Before this discovery, he paused ; he had a sense of things 
giving way, of convictions torn from his grasp : — for these 
wonderful possessions of Emily’s, which had appealed so often 
to his fancy, round which his imagination had so freely played, 
had been to him not furniture merely, but moral fixtures, 
wonderful expressions of herself. But there was the piano 
standing in their place, its back to the corner, its keys to the 
room. And where the piano had been was one of those per- 
versely ingenious pieces of accommodation in which are two 
seats placed side by side, but facing different ways, so that the 
people who occupy them have a fatuous air of trying to keep 
each other at a distance. In these discoveries he rested ; it 
was some little time before he was ready to go on; they had 
deeply impressed him ; it was not at once that he recovered 
the elasticity of his mind. He had still, however, another dis- 
covery to make, and that the most prodigious of ail. He had 
been standing in the middle of the room, pretty much where 
the servant had left him, his back to the wall opposite the 
fire-place ; he moved to the fire, and turned round ; and there, 
on the wall before him, in the middle of it, in an immense 
dark oak frame with a wide oak mounting, was a portrait of 
Arthur, an enlargement of a photograph he remembered well. 
And here his courage gave out. It was too complete a tri- 
umph of the unexpected. Before such an act of piety as this, 
morally he could only bow down. ... He remembered the 
photograph so well ! He remembered how once upon a time 
it had stood upon the piano. He remembered — and oh, so 
vividly ! — the day when, discarded and disgraced, it had been 
banished to the bottom of a drawer, opprobriously labelled with 
a nickname. And to think that it should have secured so 


VOYSEY 


389 


magnificent a reappearance as this ! He could only look and 
look, while — dreadful encounter! — the picture looked down 
at him. No, certainly he had not foreseen that this would be 
the line of her widowhood. It was a discovery to which he 
finally surrendered. He acknowledged he was in an unknown 
land. 

There was nothing for it but to wait, and the interval of 
waiting was so long that he almost fancied Emily must be pro- 
longing it designedly, to let her changes do their work. He 
left the fire and went to the window, through the diamond 
panes of which the afternoon sun was coming pleasantly into 
the room, and watched the passing of a train on the embank- 
ment. When the signal had swung up again after it, he went 
back to the fire, and faced the portrait once more. It was 
the portrait, he felt, that put him most at a disadvantage. 
It dominated and possessed the room, it was quite impossible 
to get away from it. And still, strange to tell, as the minutes 
went by, his feeling about it subtly changed. His dread of it 
yielded. He became aware of a different feeling altogether ; 
he seemed to detect a look of fine intelligence in the haunting 
eye, something not very unlike a reference to his own situa- 
tion. Or if that were going a little too far, he was conscious 
at all events, as he stood there meeting its gaze, of a kind of 
subtle going out to it on his own part as it were, of a response 
to which it was possible to appeal. He had a sense that 
somehow there was something in common between them, 
that possibly (if it were not too sacrilegious a way of putting 
it) they might be going to find themselves just a little — 
though of course he didn’t divine how — but just a little in 
the same boat, perhaps. It is conceivable that this fancy 
would have shaped itself to a definite conjecture, if at length 
and very much to his relief, Emily had not come into the 
room. 

The first moment of a meeting like this is apt to be one of 


390 


VOYSEY 


the most difficult. It was Voysey's good luck that this par- 
ticular meeting was one without a first moment. They never, 
so to speak, “ met ’’ at all. For when, as it happened, Emily 
opened the door, she admitted the dog, who, insatiable in his 
use of his opportunity, was jumping all over Voysey again 
before she herself had half crossed the room. She made an 
attempt at a rescue, but it was but a feeble attempt ; so that 
not only was it some few moments before they could 
shake hands at all, but the small civility accomplished itself 
distractedly, in a moment snatched from the dog. When 
the creature was so far appeased as to make it possible to 
sit down, the meeting, as a meeting, was over. The diffi- 
culty of the beginning had passed j the conflict with the dog 
had started them in a certain direction ; it was a question now 
merely of going on. 

“ This is a new venture of yours,” he suggested. ‘‘ I always 
had an idea you rather objected to dogs.” 

“To dogs ? No : I don’t think so. A dog is such a com- 
panion.” 

“ And where did you get him ? ” he asked. 

“ Mr. Holmes’s people gave him to me.” 

“His people? — I met him, by the way, just now at your 
gate. Ah, I remember. His people are neighbours of yours 
at Heckingden.” 

“Yes, the Holmeses are old friends of ours.” 

“ And this room,” he went on. “ I see new ventures here. 
You have been trying experiments.” 

“ I have changed one or two things.” 

“ I miss one old friend,” he laughed. “ One very comfort- 
able old friend : — the sofa.” 

“Yes, I have got rid of it,” she told him. “It was too 
big for the room. I always felt it was rather out of place. 
It gave the room a sort of heavy look.” 

Voysey, metaphorically speaking, rubbed his eyes. For 


VOYSEY 


391 


such an act of infidelity as this he was not prepared — he was 
shocked at so heartless a breaking of old bonds. He was 
almost tempted to say a word for the poor banished old 
friend, but something, possibly the desire just to keep “going 
on,’’ appeared to restrain him. 

“Well,” he admitted, “perhaps you are right. At all 
events the piano does very well on this side.” 

“Yes, I think it is a good place for it. The corner was 
rather dark.” 

“ It does very well,” he assured her. 

And then, for a moment or two, the conversation fell, the 
comfortable movement was arrested. 

Emily had seated herself within reach of one of her small 
tables, at a little distance from the fire, in a chair so well 
cushioned and easy and deep, in a chair which so evidently 
met her requirements, that the direction in which now her 
affections were placed was very clearly revealed. And this 
little revelation was a kind of small satisfaction to him; it was 
pleasant to recover at least one familiar impression amid so 
much that had changed : for certainly, as she made the most 
of her chair, with the bright, soft. Liberty silk-covered cushion 
disposed at her back, she revived his old idea that she was a 
woman to whom small comforts were a serious need. The 
bright colour of the cushion stood out vividly against the 
dead' blackness of her dress, this being another small point 
upon which he detected no difference ; her widow’s weeds, the 
crape and the collar and the cuffs, spoke to the same attitude 
of untempered resignation, and drew from him the same 
acknowledgment of an involuntary, of an almost superstitious, 
respect. She seemed, to his fancy, with the air of extreme 
discretion her mourning gave her, to be in the enjoyment of 
a kind of social benediction, whereas his own state, to which 
no sanction of any kind could be extended, felt singularly 
graceless and reprobate. He had an absurd feeling that she 


392 


VOYSEY 


had been making her peace, putting herself on the right side 
of things, while he was still quite out in the cold. Owing to 
the angle of her chair to the window he could not see her face, 
or at least not so well as to be able to read its expression ; the 
colour he had noticed had clearly been due to the exertion of 
her conflict with the dog : all that he seemed able to say with 
any confidence was that he fancied she had grown a little 
stouter. 

She left it to him to set the talk in motion again ; and this 
he did by saying, in a tone in which there was an attempt at a 
nearer approach. 

‘‘And the Heckingden experiment — how have things been 
going down there ? From your letters I gather pretty smoothly. 
At least, with not more friction than we expected. We rather 
had our doubts, you remember, about this and that, when we 
talked over the idea of your going.” 

“ It has been very restful,” she said. 

“ The country has been doing you good ? ” 

“ It was just what I wanted. I have always been very fond 
of the country, you know.” 

“Yes, I remember. The country was always a delight of 
yours. It was the social aspect of the country life that gave 
us our little misgivings, I think : — the thought of the rela- 
tions it commits one to.” 

Her answer startled him. 

“ Oh, one doesn’t trouble much about that,” she said, “in 
a place where one has lived all one’s life.” 

He felt a little disconcerted. It seemed to him that they 
had troubled about it a good deal. “ I expect it’s a happy 
thing when one doesn’t,” he said. “ But I fancied returns 
of this kind to — to one’s old neighbourhood were not quite 
without their dangers.” 

She smiled — the smile that puts an idea away. 

“ No, it has been very restful,” she repeated. 


VOYSEY 


393 


“Good!” he exclaimed. “And rest was eminently what 
you required. I was sure the country itself would be the 
right thing for you. It was only about the people one felt a 
little uncertain.” 

“ Every one has been most kind,” she assured him. 
“ People always are when one is in serious trouble.” 

He suffered — unreasonably perhaps — a further discourage- 
ment. The sentfment, and the little assumption contained in 
it, gave him a feeling of blankness. It was not so much that 
he was conscious of any particular wish to demur to the 
sentiment, though he could recall incidents that tended to 
qualify his acceptance of it, as that he found it difficult to 
adjust himself to the very sensible difference it represented 
from the point of view at which they had left off. 

“ I am very glad to hear all this,” was as far as he could 
manage to get. “Your experience has evidently been for- 
tunate. And your own people, by the way? — your father 
for instance — ” 

“ Oh, father is more of an old dear than ever,” she said. 
“ I was a great deal with him. We used to potter about the 
garden together. He has not lost any of his old funny ways.” 

“ And Mrs. Boulger ? ” Voysey permitted himself to inquire. 

“ My mother too has been very kind,” she told him. 

He felt this completed the picture, and, as the conversation 
again dropped, for a minute or two he let it lie. 

Before these various assertions of hers, each one of which 
was more unexpected than the last, he experienced a deepen- 
ing discouragement. As they fell from her one by one, like 
big drops of rain before a downpour, he found himself turning 
cold. The unknown land he was entering decidedly was a 
place of low temperature. And where, after all, was she 
taking him ? If he could have seen her face, it would have 
helped him, he fancied, to get his bearings ; but though the 
sunlight still came through the window and made brightness 


39 + 


VOYSEY 


on the further wall, her face was covered with just that veil 
of shadow which renders an expression baffling. Her attitude 
didn’t help him much ; she was sitting back in her chair with 
a stillness that, if he had not remembered that restlessness had 
never been a failing of hers, might have appeared to have 
something guarded in it. Her head was slightly inclined, so 
that the silk frill of the cushion, which rose above the white 
lawn of her collar, just failed to touch her hair. He felt sure 
now she had grown a little stouter : she impressed him as being 
maturer in person, to put it quite simply, a larger woman, than 
she had remained in his memory. He was conscious that he 
received — a little perhaps as an effect of this observation, a 
little too no doubt because he missed that note in her voice 
which had been to him as a fine acknowledgment of his 
ascendency — he was conscious he received a slightly differ- 
ent impression of her personality. He became less and less 
capable, as the moments went by, of taking quite the old line 
with her. She seemed too decidedly to have a line of her own. 
On the other hand, it was an impression, he realized, of which 
it was easy to make too much ; he divined, for instance, that 
the confidence the modulation of voice she had adopted was 
designed to express was only to be sustained by an effort. 

“ What a lot you have been doing ! ” she exclaimed, rather 
suddenly. ‘‘You have been in France and Switzerland and 
Italy, haven’t you ? There must be very few places now you 
have not been in — at some time or other.” 

“ Oh, I know all the capitals of Europe,” he laughed, “ and 
can order a dinner in all the languages ! ” 

She seemed to take him quite literally : with all the old want 
of humour. “And you have had beautiful weather. We had 
a lovely summer in England.” 

“ August was a little variable,” he said. 

“ It was beautiful with us. And you have been in Paris 
too ? ” 


VOYSEY 


395 


“Yes, twice in Paris,” he told her. 

“ And you seem to have had a good time there.” 

He paused. The idea of her little “ line ” occurred to him : 
the idea that in this suggestion there might be something of 
purpose. He wished he could see her face : the shadow that 
lay on it bothered him. 

“ My letters gave you that impression ? ” he asked. 

“You only wrote once from Paris, I think.” 

Perhaps she had felt the meagreness of their correspond- 
ence ? — Should he see? “Neither of my stays in Paris was 
a very long one,” he apologized. 

Evidently, however, it was not her wish to complain. “ You 
seemed to be going about a great deal,” she said. 

“ Not doing sights ? ” 

“ Oh, I expect you have done all the sights long ago. No, 
you seemed to be seeing a great many people.” 

“ Ah, only that ! But does that mean having a good time ? ” 

“Well, it does, doesn’t it,” she asked, “with you ? ” 

This, he felt pretty sure, was not said in good faith. Her 
tone, rather than the words themselves, made him suspicious. 
And his suspicion gave him a desire to tell her the truth in 
its naked simplicity — to tell her he had had a very bad time 
indeed, about the worse time he had ever had in his life. But 
happily the absurdity of the desire, in all its richness, instantly 
rose before him. To tell a woman you have been miserable 
because you didn’t know whether you ought or ought not to 
marry her. . . . Ah no, he had humour enough to save him 
from that ! What he did say was merely, — 

“ No, as a matter of fact my time in Paris was not very 
brilliant. For one thing I was not well there.” 

“ But Switzerland did you good ? ” 

“ Oh, worlds of good ! ” he laughed. 

“ It was nice for you to have your friend.” 

“ Splendid ! he was the very friend for my particular state ! ” 


396 


VOYSEY 


“ It must have made a great difference to you to have him.” 

‘‘You have no idea how great a difference it made ! When 
I left him I was another creature ! ” 

“And you came home in time for your London dusk.” 

He started. This sounded like confidence carried to the 
point of presumption. He had not given her credit for the 
courage to venture upon a trespass like this. He wished more 
than ever he could see her face ; the disadvantage of not see- 
ing it was intolerable. The shadow, however, was deepening 
not only on Emily’s face but over the whole length of the 
room ; the sun was no longer shining on the diamond panes, 
and the brightness had gone out upon the wall. 

“ We didn’t come home perhaps at the happiest moment,” 
he said, “ we were a little too early. The twilight still had 
rather too much summer paleness in it. This is the month 
for the best things the dusk can do. But all the same I have 
not been doing badly this last week or so : people are coming 
back now, the streets are getting pretty full : and about five 
o’clock, or a little later, our old haunts, Oxford Street, Picca- 
dilly, you know, look very much as they used to look in the 
dusk of our winter wanderings.” 

Ah, the shadow didn’t cover her this time ! He saw that 
his shot had gone home. He saw it by a just perceptible 
stiffening of her figure, and a very perceptible quivering of the 
corners of her mouth. He saw that, if he chose to follow it 
up, he might press her hard, might recover not a little of the 
ground he had lost. 

“ I suppose those streets always look about the same,” she 
answered, and she herself, he felt, quite realized — how 
feebly ! 

“Yes, at the same hour, at the same time of year, things 
look much about the same,” he said. “ The smoke and the 
glow and the mist and the lights and the passing faces — 
autumn and winter always bring them back. They are always 


VOYSEY 


397 


there if you want them. And it’s wonderful,” he added, “ how 
one does want them, how glad one is to get back to them ! 
And it’s wonderful how the old impressions come back ! Times 
change, circumstances change, one’s moods change; every- 
thing, more or less, may seem to have happened to one, and 
still, when one finds oneself up there again, one feels that one 
has come back. — Have you been up in town yet since you 
left Heckingden ? ” 

“Yes, once,” she admitted, and her voice slightly betrayed 
her. 

“ In the old haunts ? ” 

She thought a moment. “ I was in Oxford Street,” she 
remembered. 

“ At the old time ? ” 

“ No,” she replied, rather promptly, “ I went in the morn- 
ing.” 

“ Ah, that was not the best time,” he said. “ The morning 
light is not lyrical.” 

Then, quite suddenly, he broke off; he threw his advantage 
away. 

Why should he follow it up What would he gain by 
pressing her hard ? What ground had he lost that he had 
any good claim to win back He had taken his bearings, he 
knew where he was, what had happened was as plain as day ; 
she had been doing her best to tell him ever since he had come 
into the house ; all her changes had been eloquent in warning ; 
— and what had happened was just simply that she had given 
him up, that she had moved away from and rejected him. She 
had taken a leaf out of his own book, she had paid him back 
in his own coin. She had stolen a march upon him. She 
had been the first to say No. She had done what at times all 
through their intercourse he had had fine intimations that one 
day she would do, — she had turned the tables upon him. 
And if the joy he had of this discovery was but small — that 


398 


VOYSEY 


she had provided him with a simple and convenient way out, 
had set him free, was of course a very obvious conclusion — 
he believed that his first feeling was one of acquiescence. He 
saw there was justice in the fate that had overtaken him, a 
justice almost poetical. 

Yes, this was the meaning of all he had observed, of the 
changes in the room, in the air of the house, of the sense of 
a general strangeness it had given him almost from the first 
moment he had passed the door : what had they been, these 
changes, but expressions of the change in her, — what had 
they meant but that she too had been covering the ground ? 
But that with her too time and distance and the pause had 
been doing their work, — that she had made a return upon the 
past just as he had done, and, no doubt, had had moments of 
the same illumination ? Or, if it was not just this, — and he 
felt very soon that it was not, — at least the flames of the 
grand passion had burnt themselves out, the wonder of the 
experience was exhausted. At all events, she had had enough, 
she had grown tired, she had broken down, she had come to 
an end of the emotions he had been able to give her, she too 
had found it impossible to “ come back.’" And if the joy he 
had of this discovery was lamentably small, he really believed 
that in his first feeling there was no small measure of acqui- 
escence : she was well within her rights in dismissing him, the 
fate that had fallen upon his head was what the justice of the 
case required. 

He could scarcely have told how long the pause in which 
these conclusions were reached had lasted when Emily put an 
end for the moment to further reflections by saying, — pro- 
saically enough, — 

“ I think we may as well have tea now. Will you ring 
the bell ? ” 

“ And this new servant of yours,” he inquired, “ does she 
fill Ellen’s place ? Heckingden, I have an idea, is her native 


VOYSEY 


399 


home. Haven’t you brought her up from the country with 
you ? ” 

‘‘ Yes, she comes from a village a few miles off : how did 
you know ? ” 

Voysey, who had remained upon the hearthrug after ringing 
the bell, shrugged his shoulders. “ Those things divine them- 
selves,” he said. “ Have you taken her from Mrs. Boulger’s 
management ? ” 

‘‘ No, she was never with us. Mrs. Holmes recommended 
her to me.” 

“ I see. Another of the Holmeses’ kindnesses.” 

Voysey, whose getting up had drawn upon him the atten- 
tion of the dog, went back to his chair, — and Emily and he 
talked on : talked on at once with a curious ease and a curi- 
ous stiffness, with little odd relapses to familiarity in which 
the freedom of their old relations obviously survived, and 
moments of awkward pullings up and drawings in, in which 
conversation had the air uncomfortably of threading its way : 
they talked on, a good deal about little Arthur, whom, upon 
his return from his afternoon airing, the nurse, who was an 
old friend of Voysey’s, took it upon her to bring into the 
room, that he might see the wonders the months in the coun- 
try with the benefit of its air had wrought : — Voysey did full 
justice to these wonders and made good the young woman’s 
opinion of his judgment ; but what perhaps he wondered at 
most was that Emily should have kept her, that she should 
have been suffered to hold her place in the reorganization that 
had been effected. By what fine understanding had Emily 
secured her discretion, he wondered. Or was it that the risk 
Emily ran in keeping her, against the value of whose services 
must be set the possession of a store of rather inconvenient 
memories, was another proof of her devotion to the child ? 

Little Arthur disappeared, tea was brought in, Voysey’s 
impression of the new servant who brought it being that she 


400 


VOYSEY 


belonged to the type with whom service is destined to become 
appropriation, and, with its curious alternations, its freedoms 
and reserves, the talk still went on : and though Voysey saw 
that they had turned the corner, and that all they had now to 
do was just to keep “going on,” he found his own efforts for 
this purpose steadily becoming more difficult. It is a fine 
thing to be reasonable, it is a fine thing to have a sense of 
justice: — but when did a man, however reasonable he might 
be, like a woman to give him up ? Little by little the sense 
of justice, the reasonableness, the acquiescence in his fate which 
had made his first feeling upon discovering it, began to wane, 
and in their place came a sense of disillusionment, of deception, 
a bitterness, the working of an impulse of protest and revolt. 
She might be within her rights in dismissing him — he had 
reason enough still to admit that she was ; but the dismissal 
all the same was a horrible accusation of herself, a horrible 
acknowledgment of failure. It was a horrible indictment of 
their passion, for her loyalty, her sincerity, had been the one 
redeeming feature of that passion, the one element it was 
tolerable to remember. Without it, the whole experience 
looked miserably fatuous and futile, and not that only, but it 
sank to a lower level, looked grosser, uglier, more brutal. Yes, 
the grossness, the ugliness, the brutality, had been always 
there ; they had never really got away from them ; it had 
rested all along, this passion of theirs, upon a shameful and 
treacherous deception, it had been cruel and dishonest and un- 
clean. He had never got away from the horror of it, and the 
horror had been the deeper because he had never had even such 
excuse as a great passion gives, — his indeed had been a two- 
fold deception. He had deceived the husband — he had 
deceived the wife ! And for this reason he had clung to her 
good faith as to the one saving element in their intercourse : 
— her sincerity had done duty for them both ! And she had 
had it, this sincerity, abundantly, superbly she had had it ; she 


VOYSEY 


401 


had given herself with a splendid courage, — she had lived her 
hour, — she had taken her chance! The intercourse had not 
been redeemed, he would never say that : the treachery of the 
deception upon which it rested had been always there : but, 
given her loyalty to himself, and at least it had been real, 
human, intense, full of life, packed with experience, a lesson 
in the facts, if in the shames, of existence. They had come 
very near to the facts : something of the wonder of love they 
had learnt by the sea, of its infamies and terrors the city had 
told them when it had covered them with its guilty dusk ; in 
the dusk of their winter’s vigils they had felt the approach, the 
pause and the mystery, of death. They had lived, they had 
suffered, they had learnt : love and death, after all, are the two 
fixed points, the great realities, the great platitudes, of existence. 
All this — so long as her good faith was secure, so long as there 
was sincerity as well as courage in her passion : but, without 
the good faith — then there was nothing but horror in it, noth- 
ing but the grossness and ugliness and brutality remained, it 
was nothing but a shameful and a sordid sin. 

It happened by and by that Emily was called from the 
room; when she had left him, Voysey got up, and going to 
the fire-place stood with his back to it, so that the portrait on 
the opposite wall once more caught his eye. The shadows 
had begun to gather ; there was a veil of dimness on the wall. 
But the shadows were not so heavy but that the dreadful en- 
counter could be repeated, the look of fine intelligence be 
renewed. And he understood now what it had meant, that 
intelligence in the following eye, that fancied reference to his 
own situation : his unconscious divination had come true ; — 
he was standing in the dead man’s shoes. Deception had fol- 
lowed deception : the same woman had failed them both. He 
glanced from the wall to the window, and as his eye fell on 
the wooden palings and the gate, the figure of Mr. Holmes 
came back to him, while, at the same moment, from a mem- 

2D 


402 


VOYSEY 


ory of the past there also came back Emily’s confidence touch- 
ing Mr. Holmes. Instantly, a new light broke. His meeting 
with the man had a new meaning. He understood the purpose 
of his visit to the house. He turned back to the portrait, and 
this time there was not intelligence merely in the haunting eye, 
there was irony, there was mockery, there was triumph. . . . 
Ah, this was the lowest of all. This was the nadir of utter 
humiliation. It was all that was needed to complete his 
revolt, to fill the cup of his bitterness to the brim. They 
had meant nothing to her, these passionate experiences of 
theirs ; she had not learnt the lesson, she had not caught the 
meaning, they had done nothing for her ; the great opportunity 
that passion gives, she had missed it, she had thrown it away. 
It had not been the grand passion, after all : it had been a 
miserable vulgar adventure. She had not given him up — she 
had replaced him : he was to be one in the succession of her 
lovers. Yes, this moment was the worst of all, the murkiest 
of all his disillusionment. He had but one wish now, to 
escape, to get away, to close the door upon the whole adulter- 
ous abomination, to efface it as one effaces an obscenity on a 
wall. The very look of the room was intolerable. These 
changes she had made cried out against her. It revolted him 
that she should have come out of it so well, should be renew- 
ing her life in this way ! Her very physical well-being was 
an offence to him. There was a grossness in her materialism, 
in her enslavement to comfort, in the total want of heart and 
of conscience she revealed. The portrait upon the wall 
was an outrage. She had gone too far, she had overdone it, 
she had carried her attempt at the suppression of the past to 
the point of utter absurdity. This meeting of theirs exasper- 
ated him ; he protested against its triviality, its banalite ; he 
denied her right to the suppression of the past, to the assertion 
of so complete a detachment. For preposterous as it was, he 
admitted he wanted some sign of relenting from her, he wanted 
a recognition of his claim. 


VOYSEY 


403 


After an absence that had not been a very long one, — 
Voysey had lost any exact sense of the passing of minutes, — 
Emily came back, and he at once moved towards her with 
the intention of saying Good-bye. He was at the end of his 
strength, he had not self-control enough now for another 
attempt at keeping it up j he wanted supremely to get away. 
And it was just then that one of those things happened that 
words will never really describe, as, most assuredly, words 
will never really explain. He couldn’t say whether it was he 
who made the first movement, or whether the advance came 
from her; whether a change in her face drew him on, or 
whether the surrender was entirely hers: — but what happened 
was that the poor little comedy they had been playing came 
suddenly to an end, and they were themselves once more. 
She fell into his arms, and he stood there holding her to him. 
It was like one of her surrenders in the old days — after one 
of their quarrels, or some little act of devotion to the child by 
which her divided allegiance was revealed : she nestled against 
him, she clung to him with the old passionate desire for 
reconciliation, the desire to atone to him, to get right with 
him, to be good to him, to make things happy between them 
once more. And he was very willing to respond ; he had had 
enough of the misery of indictment and revolt ; he was very 
willing to use this strange forlorn moment of union, this last 
chance to be tender, to be kind. Ah, he was horribly in her 
debt, after all! — this woman who had sinned for him, and 
suffered for him, and been ready to sacrifice her mother’s love 
for him, that last worst sacrifice of all — this woman with 
whom he had known such strange vicissitudes of experience, 
into whose life he had entered in so tremendous a way. It 
was a strange forlorn moment of union, strange as lovers ever 
had known ; but if it were possible that their past had any 
good in it, anything that was to be gained from it, anything 
to be learnt, it was theirs at this moment of their parting. 


VOYSEY 


404 

He had no clear recollection afterwards of anything she had 
said : two things only remained with him j one, that her good 
faith was beyond all question — she had been loyal to the 
limits of her nature. Whatever might come to pass in the 
days before her, he had certainly no successor now. And his 
other discovery was that it was the shock of the night of 
Arthur’s return that had changed her, coming as it had after 
all he himself had made her endure in the days following their 
rupture near the brick-fields. 

He left her alone among her things, and with her sobs still 
in his ears, passed out into the autumn dusk, and crossed the 
poor suburban little Green, round which the lamps were 
lighted. A train went by on the embankment, and it had the 
old effect of recalling the haunting nearness and presence of 
the city : the city that was his home, that was so dear to him, 
that held a place in his life almost like that of a living friend : 
and yet had betrayed him, had been the witness and accom- 
plice of his folly. And if the way of experience, of the 
deepened experience, of the deepened life, was for him the 
only way of atonement, that deepening could only result upon 
condition that, for long to come, the burden of this folly 
should lie heavy upon him. 


THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 


BY 

GWENDOLEN OVERTON 


Cloth. lamo. $1.50 


A novel of the army on the frontier during the time of the Indian 
outbreaks under Geronimo and others in the late seventies. His- 
torically the book is valuable — though this is nearly forgotten in 
its interest — as a picture of scenes that can never be repeated ; a 
book which American social literature could ill afford to lose — 
while it is also an absorbing love story. 


''‘A picture of the great West — the West of the days of the 
Apache raids — clear and vivid.” — Baltimore Sun. 

‘^‘The Heritage of Unrest’ is a remarkable book, and in all 
respects it is an interesting departure from the current line of 
fiction. It is a story of American army life fully matching the 
frontier sketches of Owen Wister, and told with such touches of 
offhand colloquialism, now and again, as might mark the work of a 
Yankee Kipling.” — New York World. 

^Hn every respect — character, plot, style, scenes, descriptions, 
and personages — the book is unconventional . . . refreshing.” 

— Boston Herald. 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

ea FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 


THE LIFE AND DEATH OF 
RICHARD YEA AND NAY 


By MAURICE HEWLETT 

Author of The Forest Lover sf Little Novels of Ltalyf etc. 

Cloth. 12mo. $1.30 


** The hero of Mr. Hewlett’s latest novel is Richard Coeur de Lion, whose 
character is peculiarly suited to the author’s style. It is on a much wider 
plan than ‘ The Forest Lovers,’ and while not historical in the sense of 
attempting to follow events with utmost exactness, it will be found to give 
an accurate portrayal of the life of the day, such as might well be expected 
from the author’s previous work. There is a varied and brilliant back- 
ground, the scene shifting from France to England, and also to Palestine. 
In a picturesque way, and a way that compels the sympathies of his readers, 
Mr. Hewlett reads into the heart of King Richard Coeur de Lion, showing 
how he was torn by two natures and how the title ‘Yea and Nay’ was 
peculiarly significant of his character.” — Boston LLerald, 

“ The tale by itself is marvellously told ; full of luminous poetry ; 
intensely human in its passion ; its style, forceful and picturesque ; its 
background, a picture of beauty and mysterious loveliness ; the whole, 
radiant with the very spirit of romanticism as lofty in tone and as serious 
in purpose as an epic poem. It is a book that stands head and shoulders 
above the common herd of novels — the work of a master hand.” — 
Lndianapolis News, 

“ Mr. Hewlett has done one of the most notable things in recent litera- 
ture, a thing to talk about with abated breath, as a bit of master-craftsman- 
ship touched by the splendid dignity of real creation.” — The Lnterior, 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

ea FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 


IN THE PALACE OF THE KING 

H Love Story of Old Madrid 

By F. MARION CRAWFORD 

Author of “ Via Crucisf “ Saracinescaf etc» 

Illustrated by Fred Roe 

Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 


“ Marion Crawford’s latest story, * In the Palace of the King,’ is quite 
up to the level of his best works for cleverness, grace of style, and sus- 
tained interest. It is, besides, to some extent a historical story, the scene 
being the royal palace at Madrid, and the author drawing the characters 
of Philip II. and Don John of Austria with an attempt, in a broad, im- 
pressionist way, at historic faithfulness. His reproduction of the life at 
the Spanish court is as brilliant and picturesque as any of his Italian 
scenes, and in minute study of detail is, in a real and valuable sense, true 
history.” — The Advance. 

“ Mr. Crawford has taken a love story of vital interest and has related 
the web of facts simply, swiftly, and with moderation ... a story as 
brilliant as it is romantic in its setting. Here his genius for story telling 
is seen at its best.” — Boston Herald. 

“ For sustained intensity and graphic description Marion Crawford’s new 
novel is inapproachable in the field of recent fiction.” — Times Unions Albany. 

“ Don John of Austria’s secret marriage with the daughter of one of 
King Philip’s officers is the culminating point of this story. . . . An 
assassination, a near approach to a palace revolution, a great scandal, 
and some very pretty love-making, besides much planning and plotting, 
take place.” — Boston Transcript. 

“ Mr. Crawford wastes no time in trying to re-create history, but puts 
his reader into the midst of those bygone scenes and makes him live in 
them. ... In scenes of stirring dramatic intensity. ... It all seems in- 
tensely real so long as one is under the novelist’s spell.” — Chicago Tribune. 

“No man lives who can endow a love tale with a rarer charm than 
Crawford.” — San Francisco Evening Bulletin. 

“No book of the season has been more eagerly anticipated, and none 
has given more complete satisfaction ... a drama of marvellous power 
and exceptional brilliancy, forceful and striking . . . holding the reader’s 
interest spell-bound from the first page of the story to the last, reached 
all too soon.” — The Augusta Herald. 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 


THE REIGN OF LAW 

H 'C^k of the Kentucky Rcmpfklds 

By JAMES LANE ALLEN 

Author of The Choir Invisible f “A Kentucky Cardinal f etc^ 
Illustrated by J. C. Earl and Harry Fenn 

Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 


“The whole book is a brilliant defence of Evolution, a scholarly state* 
ment of the case. Never before has that great science been so presented; 
never before has there been such a passionate yet thrilling appeal.” 

— Courier Journal. 

“ This is a tremendous subject to put into a novel ; but the effort is so 
daring, and the treatment so frank and masterly on its scientific side, that 
the book is certain to command a wide hearing, perhaps to provoke wide 
controversy.” — Tributte^ Chicago. 

“ ‘ When a man has heard the great things calling to him, how they call, 
and call, day and night, day and night ! ’ This is really the foundation idea, 
the golden text, of Mr. James Lane Allen’s new and remarkable novel.” 

— Evening Transcript, Boston. 

“ In all the characteristics that give Mr. Allen’s novels such distinction 
and charm ‘The Reign of Law’ is perhaps supreme . . . but it is pre- 
eminently the study of a soul . . . religion is here the dominant note.” 

— The New York Times* Saturday Review. 

“ In David there is presented one of the noblest types of our fiction ; 
the incarnation of brilliant mentality and splendid manhood. . . . No 
portrait in contemporary literature is more symbolic of truth and honor.” 

— The Times, Louisville. 

“ Mr. Allen has a style as original and almost as perfectly finished as 
Hawthorne’s, and he has also Hawthorne’s fondness for spiritual sug- 
gestion that makes all his stories rich in the qualities that are lacking in so 
many novels of the period. ... If read in the right way, it cannot fail 
to add to one’s spiritual possessions.” — San Francisco Chronicle. 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

60 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 











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